Simple

Marlou sits up in bed and drinks her tea.  Our days begin this way.  Once I have sat up in bed myself, a major neuromuscular feat drawing upon years of abdominal exercise, spasticity control, balance gauging and a general abandonment of common sense, I stagger into my wheelchair.  Whirring into the kitchen, the tea kettle, primed and loaded, grinds into action.  There are minutes, perhaps two, in which I must decide the critical course.  With three types of tea, and two types of people, I face a choice.  The trade-offs aren't easy.  The Yorkshire Gold comes in tea bags.  Peet's Holiday Blend and Extra Fancy Assam do not.  The latter fit in individual tea strainers with their own tops.  The tea bag will require jerryrigged tops for the two steaming mugs, usually old lids that happen to be hanging about.  The roaring kettle forces a decision point.  I go for the Peet's, let the stuff brew and roll back to the bedroom with one steaming mug.

While Marlou sips her tea, we go through the usual morning interrogation.  How was your night?  And yours?  We generally mute our responses.  When the nights are bad, neither of us wants to come clean, it seems.  Well, I had a little trouble falling asleep, one of us might say.  'Little' is a relative term, of course, and might have spanned the distance from 11 PM to 2 AM, the hours passed with ceiling staring and thought churning.  Then, there's the 4 AM wakeup call which, if traced, would reveal hell's dialing code.  On this particular morning, we've both had good nights, little to complain of, and now there is tea.  What else?

I have a book to revise.  At the moment, the prospect of plunging into this is about as attractive as mining coal or training someone's weimaraner.  Marlou has laundry to do.  She will need quarters.  Such is life in our quarters, two 1950s apartments, coin-operated washers across the way.  Ours is, and always has been, in odd life for people with ages in the neighborhood of 60.  Perhaps not really, when we consider friends whose mortgage payments must expand as the economy shrinks.  To me, life on Roble Ave.  feels like a sort of long-term Bedouin encampment.  Or one of those double-wide mobile homes.  We never think of moving.  We have put down roots.  And yet when the time comes, the whole thing can roll, roots and all.

Roots are on my mind this morning.  I am keenly aware of them, the ones I keep exposing to the crisp February drought.  The cover crop refuses to die.  This is because, things being what they are, I have refused to obsess about it.  In past years, once the gardener has pitchforked my vetch and annual ryegrass into the earth, I began a long-term process of hacking away at what's left.  The plants keep growing, the rains keep coming usually, and I keep knocking the green matter back, chopping it down into the ground.  The cover crop eventually gives up, the spring planting takes over, and we have a garden.  

This is my Sunday morning mission.  I will call the local garden center and determine the availability of spinach and lettuce seedlings.  A daring move.  I may have to actually drive there.  It's almost a mile away.  Actually, I have historically rolled there directly in my wheelchair.  I don't know.  Like the tea, this will involve another decision point.  To say that I don't drive much is an understatement.  My car was last fueled in 2008.

Our lives have shrunk.  A friend suggested that I read to Marlou, and not just anything, but Roald Dahl, and not just any Dahl, but his stories for young people, precocious young people, perhaps, but young.  The stories are delightful, the friend assured.  Still, in her account I could feel life narrowing.  Nothing that challenges the mind, I heard her saying, something comfortably childish.

And here, one must seriously consider the shrinking of lives, the childish, the simple.  'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free', America's Shakers used to sing.  That's why I'm going to follow my friend's advice and grab a couple of Dahl's adolescent tales from our local library.  I've been reading the letters of E. B. White to Marlou from a book she gave to me.  Writing from another era of American life, for all of his sophistication, his pivotal role in the rise of The New Yorker, White sounds both simple and free.  He chose to write for young people, as well as adults.  And who knows, but we may just move on to White's Charlotte's Web.  

For life is showing us its limits, demanding that we accept our own.  There's a paring down, a shedding of excess.  Our closets, certainly mine, contain dark reaches of fashion history.  We plan to jettison these old clothes, and yes, we will need help.  We are going to hire a closet jettisoner.  So be it.  No time to put on airs, impress anyone or do anything we, and particularly Marlou, don't really want to do.  'Tis a gift.