Wanton Optimism Update (With a piece of humble pie on the side)

Looks a little like grass

Yeah, right.  Spinach!  They’re probably just little weeds, I thought.

My wife called me Friday.  I was at work and she was at Jones, one of my two gardens.  She wanted to know if there was anything she could do for me while she was there.  Not really, I said, except check how the seeds I’d planted twelve days earlier are doing.  Might something have sprouted, yet?  Nothing had when I last checked five days before.

“I think spinach is growing,” she told me.  “It kind of looks like little bits of grass but I’m pretty sure I know what spinach looks like.”  I was skeptical.  I forget how I answered her.  I probably imagined I answered politely, respectfully, but she told me later she could tell I didn’t believe her.  I didn’t.  What nerve, I know, but I didn’t.  She must have been mistaking weed seedlings for spinach, I suspected.  I want to blame my response on my ambivalent attitude toward seeds, my mixture of admiration for and disbelief in their ability to actually sprout, but really, it was just good old-fashioned arrogance.

We didn’t discuss the alleged seedlings further on the phone at that moment.  I quizzed her about the moistness of the soil.  Wet enough? Too dry?  Were there droplets of condensation on the inside of the plastic row cover?

Oh brother!  Spare us, Mister Garden Expert.

So Saturday morning a little after 7:00 a.m. during my usual routine of going to the market and shopping at the grocery, I stopped at Jones to see these so-called spinach seedlings.  My heart sank in a split-second when I saw them, not because they really were spinach seedlings, which was reason to be glad, but because I hadn’t trusted her.  Did I think she hadn’t been paying attention at all these last two years of gardening?  Did I imagine I had a monopoly on all garden knowledge?  Frankly, I was the one who had forgotten that spinach sprouts look like thin strands of grass.  And what’s more, the “weeds” were growing in a neat, little row.  How convenient.  Of course she would have noticed and understood what that meant (they had clearly been deliberately planted) as soon as she saw it.

I apologized over coffee a little later that morning.  I told her she had been right about the spinach seedlings and that it had been pretty rude and, well, just bad of me to doubt her.  In the grand scheme this wasn’t a huge thing, but it still had been frustrating for her.  She forgave me.  The lessons?  Settle down about the seed thing, the garden thing.  It’ll grow just fine, possibly even in spite of your worries.

But above all, mister, trust your wife.

They're even in a row...