Combatting Nature

My weekend was incredibly dull to describe. We basically spent it gardening out at my MIL's place, pulling out skeins of confounded mint roots and churning up the soil a bit. We planted potatoes, carrots, basil, turnips... Back at our place, I planted some squash, beans, and a few other things, and we basically did some major clean up.

One very bizarre thing that happened came as we were celebrating our anniversary by going to our favorite breakfast spot, a funky little place out in the middle of nowhere, and going on a hike. The hike started off just fine--the weather was perfect, the woods were lovely. Then, my guy spots some folks with little mesh bags of morels, the gold of the forest in our neck of the woods at this time of year. So he launches on a minor rant about how we weren't going to buy any morels this year. I said, fine, whatever. They are expensive, after all, and we're on a strict food budget.

He then decides we're going to hunt for morels and gives me all sorts of directions, wandering off into the woods next to the trail. I start to sulk: I don't want to spend this lovely time together staring at the leaf litter looking for fungi. We look and look, or rather, he looks and looks and I poke around, getting more and more annoyed at his tone and our fruitless search. Finally, we somehow start arguing, after I said something about asking someone who knew more about where the best places to find morels might be. He took umbrage, thinking that I somehow doubted his abilities in a general way, and eventually flew into a rage when I wouldn't apologize for something I didn't understand.

We're both really stubborn and we both have a temper. After a while, I walked off down the trail, sensing that the fireworks were becoming pointless. I started wondering whether there was any point in going through all these trials to have kids, if we couldn't explain the most basic problems to each other. I went about a quarter of a mile or so, and I decided, now very calm, that I needed to go back. I half expected him to have high-tailed it back to the car, he was that angry. But I found him sitting, brooding by a log. As he sat there, holding me, I told him I wasn't afraid of his anger and that it wouldn't hurt our relationship. He told me I had touched on an old wound and he had flipped out. Our natures had been in full-out combat: my hard-headed refusal to take perceived slights or orders, even when they are merely in my mind, and his desperate fear of some unspeakable inadequacy, one I've never seen.

We decided to head back to the car, and then he asked me, sweetly, kindly this time, if I would hunt for some morels with him. I said yes, because when he asked sincerely instead of ordering me, I actually wanted to do something with him.

So we tromped over ridge and creek, cutting through the forest back to an old eroded road that led down into a broad, populated valley. There, the firepinks and Jack in the Pulpits were everywhere as the white, puffy clouds of summer marshaled on the horizon. We began to sing stupid songs, leap into the creeks that crisscrossed the road, and imagine what we would grow in the fields around us.