Sometimes, I can't help but find something so charming in my husband's addictive nature. It drives me nuts usually, and it's wreaked havoc on our lives...but it's so funny sometimes. Like yesterday, for instance, when he came home from working in a relative's yard with his sinuses irritated, he explained:Well, I'd found this wisteria plant while I was walking to the bus. And you'd said you liked it, but I'd never really liked it before. You know what it looks like, right? Like big grapes, but it's flowers? I pulled off a handful, and I smelled it. It smells so good! I kept smelling it and smelling it all day. I pulled off fistfuls every time I passed by a vine! I tasted it, too. It's sweet if you pull off the stems and drink the little bit of juice on the inside.
...and he demonstrated the grabbing, snorting action he'd done, again and again, apparently, all day long, until he'd made himself sick. He can't just smell the flowers, see...he's got to SMELL THE FLOWERS.
I always loved that intensity about him, that willingness to roll life up in a ball like in the Marvell poem:
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
It's hard, though, to find balance when you live like that, or when your mind has come unbalanced from seizing the day too strongly, from sucking every bit of sap and smelling every sweet thing too much, too much at once, as if there isn't going to be enough...as if every moment was the last.
Photo by Hicker Photo
