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In the dead of winter, it’s silent. But it had been silent long before the snow had settled in all those months ago. It was silent before the frost laid in the trees and the wind blew flurries of snow on the pavement. It was silent because you were alone.
You married Chris for convenience, but it soon blossomed into love. Those few months felt like summer as the affection between you lit a warm flame in your soul and danced in the sunlight of reciprocity.
Then the leaves began to fall, crispen, and crumble to dust.
He was gone often on missions, and it seemed he took the warmth with him. When he finally came home, the warmth returned, but it was diminishing until it felt like just a dying candle cradled in your shaking hands.
Somewhere along the way the affection you once shared had burrowed away deep in the earth, but it wasn’t a mystery why. Chris was tired. He loved his job, yes, but it was sucking the life out of him. What made it worse was that it was necessary. He was saving lives, not reviewing tax returns.
It didn’t make it any easier to deal with.
So you sit in the house he bought you and rot in the silence he left behind.
On this particular day, about three weeks after Chris had left for Romania, you sat in the small breakfast nook next to the kitchen. The three windows that arched around you gave a nice view of the backyard. A thick layer of wet and heavy snow sat on the trees and their extended branches, bowing them down towards the ground.
You swirled a mug in your hand, watching a tree branch fly skyward when the weight of the snow it carried became too heavy. All that remained in your mug was a shallow pool of cold tea that herded the small pieces of rogue tea leaves towards the middle as it was lightly circulated.
The silence was creeping up on you again. This cold morning after a large snow storm was exceptionally quiet. The snow was dampening the noise of the world and it felt like the walls of a padded cell confining you to this house that was too new to creak.
The sound of blood rushing in your ears began to scare you when you unintentionally strained your hearing on finding any sound you could possibly identify. You snapped up in your chair, the rubber feet skidding on the waxed hardwood and mug hitting the table. You must be going insane.
You stood quickly, mug in hand as you hurried to the kitchen sink- trying to forget about the silence that closed around you when you paid it too much mind.
When the sink finally sputtered to life, you washed out the mug slowly, swirling the water and rubbing it with your hands as you thought about Chris. You suppose that you were disappointed, in a way. You knew this was how it was going to be long before you stood at the altar saying your vows.
Maybe you just thought it would be easier to deal with than this. Of course you couldn’t have fathomed just how crushing your solitude would be when it felt like your time with Chris was going to last forever.
As you flipped the mug upside down on the drying mat, your eyes drifted out the garden window above your sink and to the yard once more. A house as big as this needed an equally big yard, but apparently nothing to fill said yard but two big elm trees and a flat manicured lawn. It was nice enough in the summer- Chris had a grill on the small deck, and dinner with the mosquitos was nice- but now that snow came once a week to crush the grass, it looked emptier than ever.
Your eyes began scanning the expanse of the lawn, suddenly planning out rows of garden beds and flowers sprouting in lines on the border of the fence. The tall, fringed leaves of carrots would sprout from moist soil- bees would buzz, flying through the foliage and landing on stray weeds- a small fountain would bubble quietly in the middle- birds would dip into a small bird bath and chirp as they displaced dried leaves floating on the surface-
This… this was something… something big, something to dream about, something to plan out and toil over- something you had to do-
-or there’d be nothing to do at all.
. . .
The rest of the day passed in a blur as you hunched over your computer in the home office, furiously researching how you could achieve this garden. There was so much to look into that you had never considered before, and every article led you further down a rabbit hole that consumed you long after the sun had already set.
You had your mind made up as you finally stood from your chair in the now dark office, clutching the stack of notes scribbled hastily on miscellaneous papers. Once the last frost ended, you were making this garden.
. . .
Chris returned from Romania in late March. He looked more stressed than you had ever seen before. You didn’t have to talk to him to know that he had been through something awful, but it was clear he wasn’t going to talk about it.
You hugged him tight when he came through the door. He sighed as he dropped his bags and wrapped his arms around you, slumping over and exhaling like it was the first time he’d had a breath in weeks. At least he felt safe.
He barely talked all evening, and you gave him his space to breathe. At night, just before you fell asleep, Chris quietly crawled under the covers and curled his chest into your back, holding you to him like you were the only thing tethering him to the present. He nuzzled into your neck and sat there, breathing quietly, for several seconds before finally speaking in a hushed voice.
“I’m going to be busy these next few weeks.”
You turn your head slightly and he leans back to look at you.
“I know.” You say quietly.
He swallows, “Someone… important died, and now we- I- have to assume the care of his infant daughter.”
You turn to face him fully, trying to find his eyes in the darkness. “Oh, Chris…” you sigh, “I’m so sorry.”
He shakes his head, kissing your temple. “It’s okay, I'll work through it- I always do.”
“I'm here for you, Chris.”
“I know.”
. . .
In the following weeks he was gone in the mornings before you woke, and returned long after you were asleep- but it left you the day to shop. You were careful to not overspend on the household needs budget, and stored anything you bought out in the yard where you knew Chris wouldn’t be going.
By the end of April, the yard was filled with bags of dirt, planks of wood for garden beds, packets of seeds, and assorted decorative rocks.
In the last week of April on one of the warmest afternoons to date, you decided to begin building the garden boxes out in the yard. Apparently you couldn’t hear the back door opening over the sound of your drill, because the hand on your shoulder made you spill your box of screws all over the grass.
“Jesus!” You turn quickly, finding Chris looming over your sitting form.
“You having fun out here?” His lips twitch into a small smile.
“I- well,” You struggle to find the words.
“Did you think I wouldn’t notice the growing pile of dirt bags in the backyard?” He folds his arms across his torso, chest accentuated by his biceps as he squeezes them together. “I may be tired, but I'm not blind.”
You swallow, afraid he was mad at your excessive spending, but instead he squatted down next to you, eyes now focused on the boards of wood you had just been screwing together.
“Need my help?”
. . .
He tells you that he got off work early today while he carries four bags of dirt on his broad shoulders - you guess the pile of paperwork was finally surmountable after so many weeks. It wasn’t the end of his work- especially not with that infant- but he promised that the worst of it was over.
Chris finally felt like your husband again after all those months of being a shell– a distant dream off somewhere you weren’t allowed to know. But now that he was laughing at the spilled dirt on your pants, there was no way to deny the warmth blossoming in your chest in his presence.
This is what you dreamed of when you stared out at this frozen yard all those months ago, and you weren’t going to let it slip away.
. . .
Of course those little moments weren’t going to last forever, but his absences were beginning to shorten as the weather warmed. He had recuperated and become his lively self again, laughing and cooking dinner with you like he used to. The loneliness that once plagued you dissipated before your eyes- planting itself in the dirt and re-emerging as budding geraniums and dandelions.
Each morning that you looked out the back window and saw the garden you built together, a gentle appreciation washed over you. All that soil and water had filled the gap that once separated you, and the roots that now connected you only grew stronger with each passing day.
The last frost had come and gone, and Chris was ever happier with each passing day. Some evenings he was eager to get on his knees in the dirt and plant tomato seedlings with you despite his age, and some evenings he was content to watch you offer the spout of your watering can to a thirsty radish.
On one such night where he found himself just content to watch, you had set up a speaker on the deck railing while you attempted some rather tedious landscaping with small colored stones. Chris was leaning over the railing next to the speaker, a lit cigarette in one hand and a whiskey neat in the other as he watched you.
You had been hunched over the dirt, clutching the stones in your free hand while you tried to create a concentric pattern around the rose bushes growing by the fence. When your store of pebbles ran out you finally stood, groaning as you bent backwards and cracked your back. Stepping back, you squinted, trying to discern what you had created in the dimming light.
“Chris, come look.” You called.
He put out the butt of his cigarette in a gifted ash tray and joined you in the garden, also squinting at the dirt.
“You know I can’t see anything in the dark.”
You laugh as he brings a hand up to your shoulder and massages it, “Right- I'm sorry… old man.”
“Old man?” He asks incredulously, your smile only spreading further.
Just as he’s about to say something, a particularly loved song of yours begins to play on the speaker, and your gasp of excitement cuts him off. You quickly take hold of his shirt and pull him to face you. Your hips wag back and forth to the beat, hands now making a lazy attempt at dancing. He only gives you an amused look.
“C’mon Chris, I know you like this song too.”
He chuckles, slowly putting his hands up to mimic yours, but the laugh you let out immediately stops him.
“It’s not funny!” He laughs, gently nudging you.
“It’s very funny!” You smile.
He picks you up quickly, kissing you through the giggles as he carries you to bed, whiskey and speaker long forgotten outside.
. . .
There was finally love in your life again. The kind of love you thought had disappeared. But the candle whose flame once dwindled in your hands now burned brightly with the passion that creating this garden gave you. After Romania, Chris took several weeks off to spend with you at home both working on the garden and enjoying your company. Chris fired up his grill again when his sister came to visit, and you laughed as you glasses clinked together in cheers.
In the middle of summer, it’s noisy. If there’s no thunder from an afternoon storm, then there’s the laughter of a party in the yard over. If there’s no party, then there’s chirping crickets and fireworks. When the rain takes over your job of watering, you’ll sit inside at the breakfast nook looking out at the yard- not to escape the crippling silence- but to plan the next bed of October vegetables with Chris.
You knew you’d never fully escape the silence that permeated the air when Chris wasn’t there, but if the silent hours spent in the garden had taught you anything, it was that the silence wasn’t something to be scared of anymore. The silence was no longer the walls of a room keeping you in, it was the air that circulated the trees and pushed the blades of grass against one another. It was your bedroom at night while Chris slept next to you, safe and relaxed. It was a home, not a prison.
And when the leaves made their gentle descent towards the yellowed grass, and when the last squash was plucked from its curling vine, the silence of winter would creep in again. What once plagued you as a permanent force now became a temporary moment between the fall and spring. So when the first spring buds unfurled and stretched towards the heavens, you’d know that the summer wind would soon blow through your hair.
After all, flowers come after the frost.