Eventually, the manager realized that allowing an employee’s pregnant wife to put up stock, especially when doing so often involved a ladder or a hook, was probably a liability issue. After that I stuck to my guns about those oil filters but let Josh do the rest.

On mornings when the manager arrived early, I’d head out for the college a little sooner than usual. With plenty of time before my first appointment, I’d walk from the college on the north end of town until I reached the beginning of the rolling fields south of town. If I had time to go over just one more hill, I would be able to see the four substantial stone chimneys of the beautiful historic home where we had been married the previous summer, and behind it, the Blue Ridge mountains. In the foreground, morning glories, still open, but flagging.

I was too, now, as I lugged my pregnant belly back to the school. The belly that felt enormous to me and my constricted lungs, yet others continued to insist was so tiny.

Then followed hours of tutoring. I loved each of my students, but especially my regulars: the young woman from Taiwan, sent by her father to the US to study business, who loved my blonde hair so much that she tried to bleach hers and spent the summer mourning her streaky, orange-pink hair. The kind, slight, determined woman from Ecuador whose children had completed school and now she had time to learn as well. The woman who received a cochlear implant at forty and, finally able to hear, decided to go back to school.  

In the evening, I’d head south to pick up Josh, my dear Irish boy with curling black hair, grease under his fingernails, and eyes as blue as the morning glories that taught me to greet with delight every morning spent with him.

Thirteen years later, freshly transplanted from Virginia to Colorado, we were experiencing our first summer of Colorado green (spoiler alert: brown).

The view from our back porch was lovely in its own right—the Rockies against sparkling blue skies and spectacular sunsets, a small town and a few flat-topped hills in the midground, an open field just beyond our back gate. But in June the field already consisted of crackling, rasping grasses in shades of beige and tan and it was likely to stay that way.

Starving for green and wanting my little guy to experience the pleasure of growing something, I came home one morning with a seed packet of morning glories. Giddy with excitement, Finnegan joined on me the back porch to plant and water the seeds. His dimpled hands dispatched these unfamiliar tasks with more enthusiasm than grace, but he was so careful to follow my directions as exactly as he could. It was a pleasure to heap on the praise and watch his blue eyes kindle with joy.

Too young to remember this process from our fabulous garden the year before, he expected the seeds would spring to life instantly he completed his ministrations. I had suspected as much.

To temper the blow, I had also brought him a potted marigold with plenty of blooms to keep him busy in the meantime. These he instantly dubbed Foopy’s flowers, and they stood up marvelously to his affectionate caresses and routine overwatering.

At breakfast the following day he asked if we could check on our marnin’ goalies. He had remembered! And had retained or even expanded his enthusiasm for them. Yes, we could definitely check on the marnin’ goalies.

Each day that summer we would check for blossoms and celebrate each new bud. There were blue, pink, and white. Mostly brilliant pink. We stroked the delicate petals, peered down their narrow throats, traced the veins of their almost heart-shaped leaves, and delighted in the tightly curled tendrils of new trailers.  

Whenever we had visitors, he would usher them to the porch to admire and exclaim over his marnin’ goalies and chuckle gleefully over Foopy’s flowers.