If flowers can be promiscuous, then my yard is a little tramp. Honeysuckle and snows-in-summer border my lawn.  Gigantic flower beds spill over with white hollyhocks, purple daisies and multicolored asters.  Even some of my trees sport flowers for two weeks of every spring.

And I have a rose garden, which no one ever promised me.

My addiction to flowers started right after I left home for college.  I discovered that gardening was a great way to relieve the stress of going to school while working full-time.  I’d come home from work at ten o’clock at night, too wired to study or sleep.  So I’d go outside in the dark and pull weeds in my flower garden.  It rejuvenated me.  After an hour or so of barehanded digging in the dirt and smelling the heady aromas, I’d feel like a new woman, ready to take on the world.  Or Political Theory.  Or whatever.

It was always different dirt because I changed residences often.  When I was growing up, we moved so much that my sister and I pretended our olive skin was due to gypsy blood.  Make-believe was preferable to the truth – that our Hispanic father said “Adios” before we hit kindergarten, and my mother hitched our lives to a stepfather who promised her stability, something they moved around constantly trying to find.  By the time I was eighteen, I had lived in fifteen different places and attended seven different schools.

Out on my own, life was more of the same.  I lived with a series of roommates, but whenever there was a disagreement, I packed my things and moved.  I learned to pack in less than five hours, and the post office sent me a change-of-address kit every six months, whether I asked for it or not.

The one constant in my life was my flowers.  I must have planted thousands of blooms during the four years I was in college.  In ten different places. It was always a different canvas – ceramic pots or driveway flower beds, but my medium remained the same:Annuals.

The flowers that don’t come back.  “Why bother with perennials,” I said to myself.  “I won’t be here long enough to enjoy them.  Nothing has ever lasted long in my life.  Why get my hopes up?”

Each spring I would just buy more annuals.  Replanting was fun.  Easy.  And – most of all – safe. After college I got a good job, but I kept up my old habits.  Live somewhere six months.  Plant annuals.  And move again.  Fresh soil.  Clean carpets.  No ties.

Then I met John.

John was another annual.  On our first date he said, “I’ll never get married, and I’m perfectly content to live alone, so don’t get too attached.”

I admired his honesty.  This was not a man who would tell me he loved me just to get me into bed.

We played that game for about two years – him living alone in his apartment, and me living in a new place every few months.  We both had our space, and we took a long time to get acquainted.  I learned he was a man who greatly valued his alone time, and I learned not to take it too personally when he needed to escape inside himself for a few days.  I continued to plant truckloads of one-shot flowers, unwilling to risk perennials.

During those two years, I slowly learned to trust.  Despite his warning, John was there, spring after spring.  The same touch.  The same smile.  The same guy.

And then, one hot summer day, when I was knee-deep in a batch of petunias, John asked me that magical question.

“Would you go halves with me on a house?”  He paused.  “Because I can’t afford to buy the one I want all by myself.”

Neither of us was in a hurry to marry, but we both knew what he meant.  Neither of us would live together unless it was going to be permanent.

We moved into our brand-new, twenty-five-hundred-square foot house two weeks before Thanksgiving.  The first few months we spent moving our meager furniture around and around, trying to fill up the space.  During the cold winter I never thought much about flowers.

It happened on the first warm day in February.  I always caught spring fever in February, even though I knew it would probably snow the next weekend.  Normally I would content myself with reading garden catalogs and visiting home stores.  But I discovered something magical on my first trip to the home-supply store as a bona fide homeowner:

Roses.

Roses are perennials, but you can plant rose bushes when it’s still cold outside, because they are dormant.  And they will bloom the first year you plant them.

I was a woman possessed.  I had an acre of dirt at my disposal, and I could start planting immediately.  I bought twelve rose bushes, or maybe I should say rose “sticks,” for $1.99 each.  They resembled very small TV antennas coming out of the ground, and I planted my very first rose garden.  It was the first permanent mark in the soil of my new home.

That spring I went wild at the nursery, spending truckloads of money on flowers – Sweet Williams, Johnny Jump-Ups, candytuft and fragrant phlox.  I was amazed at new breeds and colors I had never seen before, all because I had never bothered to look in the perennial section.  I realized there might be a lot of things just waiting to be discovered, if I opened my eyes and looked.

The first spring John and I worked in the yard together tested the limits of our relationship.  I discovered what true love was when I tried to build a planter box with the help of the finickiest man on the planet – a man who not only reads all the directions before starting a project, but who goes to the hardware store and buys all the recommended tools.  I’m a woman who is content to pound nails into the wall with my shoe.
Summer arrived with our love intact and plenty of perennials planted everywhere.  We made it through three more springs before completing the landscape of our front yard, and then we decided to make our relationship legal.  We figured if our love could survive the planting of a two-hundred-square-foot lawn and the construction of a granite patio, it could survive anything.

We were married three years ago – in the spring, naturally – and have experienced both the joy and frustration that come with a marriage license.  I no longer read the apartment ads whenever we have a fight, and he leaves the door open when he goes into his private reverie.

My love affair with flowers is a tender one.  But the difference between flowers and people is that people can choose to be annuals or perennials.

Sometimes when I am working in the garden, I look across at John, and I have no doubt that the two of us will keep growing together, year after year.  We are perennials.

Originally published in Chicken Soup for the Single’s Soul, 1995

Note: While the marriage didn’t last, I still like the story so thought I’d place it here.