The Good Wife

She loved orchids

She loved orchids.

When he had proposed he’d given her a bouquet of them. Her eyes had shone in matching brightness. How did you know orchids are my favorite?
He hadn’t known. But he had felt lucky in that moment to have happened on that arrangement of flowers. Lucky like when she had agreed to become his wife. She carried orchids at their wedding. Something suiting about the stark white petals in her hand. Pure and correct like her. With a touch of jealousy painted in their hearts.

Sometimes I feel like they shouldn’t be my favorite she laughed. Every romantic loves a daisy. Wildflowers vulnerable, yielding, filling the room with sweetness and the reminder of sunshine. She wasn’t a daisy girl.
The novel-women, orchid-loving, are always the bad wife. Superficial, selfish. She shrugged. But they are my favorite. They are so perfect and strong.

She wasn’t perfect. Hot-tempered Irish ancestors still living on in her blood, she could use her tongue like a whip. But she was strong like an orchid. Holding on in the better and worse times like the one orchid in the Valentine’s bouquet of all-flowers he gave her. The short-lived wild flowers had been gone for days, smelling of rotted stems as they died away. She had saved that last-man-standing in her yellow coffee cup. Though its stem was cut and days numbered, it continued bravely on.

He understood her love for orchids. There was something about them wilder than a wildflower. Something untamed for all their perfectness. Holding onto secrets they would never share. You could never really own an orchid. It would sit placidly in your windowsill but still never be yours.
“It’s hard for two to become one,” his grandfather with 63 years of marriage experience had told him once. “You have to learn to laugh together,” he said. He was a newly married man then, basking in the glory days of the first year. How could this ever be hard?

Then they brought life to new little lives and the sun and earth’s rotation shifted to include more planets in their universe. He understood better what his grandfather had meant. It was hard sometimes. Love came in all different packages, sometimes like gifts from Great Aunt Betty, coming in ways you…

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