Wildflowers

A short story

May 29, 2026

For four years we lived in a tiny house on Peete Street. Six hundred and fifty square feet if you were being generous. Less, really, once you accounted for the washer and dryer shoved into a closet and the bathrooms barely large enough to turn around in without negotiating with the wall.

It was three stories stacked on top of each other like someone had balanced shoeboxes into a home and then dared gravity to object.

And God, we loved it.

The kitchen was not finished when we moved in. There was a sink. A small efficiency counter. A hood hung too low with a vent that went nowhere — drilled wrong, not to code, and yet somehow it passed inspection, which we chose to read as the universe endorsing our decision.

Patrick wanted them to finish it before we moved in. “I don’t want to live without a finished kitchen for a year,” he said.

I, meanwhile, saw the situation exactly the way raccoons see unsecured trash cans: opportunity.

The project had started as some young architect’s noble dream of affordable housing until reality arrived holding a calculator and every bank in the city said absolutely not. I knew the builders were exhausted and hemorrhaging money and wanted out. I also knew they were about to do a terrible rushed job if we made them finish it. So I told Patrick, with the full confidence of a woman who has never once accurately estimated the timeline of a renovation project, “Don’t worry. We’ll finish it ourselves. Six weeks, tops.”

There were contractor disasters. Delays. At one point our contractor fell through someone else’s roof. He survived, but he was really injured, which became the benchmark by which we measured project success after that. “Well, nobody fell through a ceiling today” became morale.

Eventually our friend Wendy designed the kitchen, and somehow we ended up with this stunning custom space for nine thousand dollars, which feels now like financial folklore. The kind of story old homeowners tell children around a fire while everyone quietly understands those days are gone forever.

A year later, to the day, the kitchen was done.

Patrick looked at me and smiled. I looked at him and smiled.

I know what I’d done.

That kitchen was where we lived. Before it was finished. During. After. We pulled in an IKEA island and sat across from each other through all of it. Dim light — the house was LEED certified, which is a polite way of saying there was never quite enough of it — coffee going cold, sometimes tea, sometimes wine, hours stretching past the point where either of us tracked them. Theology. Business. Human behavior. Dreams. Death. Meaning. Why people hurt each other. Why people stay. We were solving everything. The conversations had no agenda and no end and no bottom. A shared interior world that belonged only to the two of us.

There was very little distance between us. In any sense.

Patrick was six foot one and two hundred and twenty pounds. In six hundred and fifty square feet, we bumped into each other every single day for four years.

We didn’t mind.

That was the thing about that house. About us. We were full send on everything — the house, the gym, the new location we’d just signed a five year lease on right as COVID arrived to laugh at our plans. COVID had taken my yoga studio. We had joined forces. We were living small and building big and somehow both of those things felt exactly right. The world was coming apart at the seams and we were thriving in our tiny house in ways that had nothing to do with square footage.

And through all of it, in that first year while the kitchen was still being finished, Patrick did the dishes by hand. Every day. He had told me before we moved in that a dishwasher was a non-negotiable, that he would not live without one. And then he did. Every day. Without complaint.

I don’t know what to call that except love. Patrick would probably call it his chore list. But I was there. I saw his face. It was love. And if I’m being honest, somewhere in the middle of all of it — the unfinished kitchen and the global pandemic and the five year lease and the tiny house — we were also having the best sex of our lives. Make of that what you will.

Once the kitchen was done, I needed another project.

The pergola came next.

For my birthday one October, Patrick helped me build this massive black pergola with narrow natural oak slats running overhead. It looked like something out of a magazine neither of us could afford. I love projects. Love creating things. Love movement and momentum and turning imagination into matter. Patrick always humored me, though I now realize humored is too small a word. He gifted me his energy for those projects. That was love too.

The patio became this little sanctuary. String lights. Plants. Coffee in the mornings. Wine at night. Music drifting through open windows in summer.

Behind it sat this retaining wall with two trees above it. One sumac. The other a spring tree that blooms pink for about twelve minutes each year before dropping petals everywhere.

And underneath them was a bed of ugly pine needles.

I hated those pine needles with the passion of someone avoiding more important emotional truths.

So naturally I decided I would create a wildflower garden.

Not casually either. I researched everything. Pollinators. Bloom schedules. Soil conditions. Native species. I bought packets and packets of seeds. Thousands of them. I mapped out where colors would rise and fall. I placed stones. Curved the lines. Designed crescendos of bloom like I was planning a tiny floral symphony for insects.

The problem with wildflowers, however, is that before they become flowers, they look exactly like failure.

Or weeds.

Tiny green sprouts. Sparse. Uneven. Fragile little things that require a tremendous amount of faith.

I knew this.

Patrick apparently did not.

One afternoon, after a long day coaching at the gym, I came home and looked out at the yard.

The entire garden was covered in fresh red pine needles.

I remember standing there, mouth open. Was I being punk'd? Did I imagine the entire thing? What in the actual — had Kevin done this? Kevin, our friendly neighbor, who had never once given me a reason not to trust him — did he destroy my wildflower garden?

“Patrick,” I yelled. “WHAT HAPPENED TO MY WILDFLOWER GARDEN?”

He comes around the corner — because in a house that small you are always just around a corner.

“Those were wildflowers?”

Pause.

“I thought those were weeds.”

He had spent the entire afternoon lovingly destroying my garden.

Not maliciously. Worse. Helpfully.

In his mind, his wife had apparently entered some kind of depressive horticultural episode and allowed chaos to overtake the backyard, and he, being a proactive husband, had stepped in to save the situation.

He had weeded everything.

Every single sprout.

Then laid fresh pine needles down like he deserved a community service award.

And the terrible thing was he was so proud of himself. Standing there with a sincere smile. Look what I did.

I was furious. Devastated. Laughing. Crying. All at once.

Because this is marriage sometimes.

One person carefully planting thousands of invisible hopes.

The other accidentally killing them in an act of love.

And somehow neither one of you is the villain.

We moved out of the Peete Street house in 2023. Patrick was murdered in 2025.

I have spent a lot of time in the devastation. I will spend more. That is true and it is necessary and I will not apologize for it.

But I cannot only live there. That is not how someone continues to move. That is how someone gets stuck.

So I am going to tell you the love stories too. The ones about tiny houses and unfinished kitchens and wildflower gardens that looked like weeds. The ones about a man who washed dishes by hand for a year without complaint and destroyed my garden in an act of pure devotion.

I am going to tell you these stories because the grief is as great as the love.

And you cannot understand one without knowing the depths of the other.