Romantic Recreation & Re-creation (standard:romance, 2921 words)
Author: Mookoo Liang	Added: Mar 13 2006	Views/Reads: 3567/2604	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
This is a story about my better half, submitted just before her birthday this year, 2006. I would like to share it with you. May the Lord bless her, her & my friends, and you---anyone who is reading this "romance"!

Romantic Recreation & Re-creation 

By Mookoo Liang 

================ 

Last Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Jean brought home as many as
fifty pots of flowers when she returned from her work. I was surprised 
at that. How come she got the idea of planting flowers? How could she 
have spare time for going to a flower market during her busy workdays? 
How did she bring back so many flowerpots at a time? Was she able to 
handle such various kinds of flowers? 

Jean placed most of the flowerpots in the front yard. Some of the pots
were bigger than others, and the various types of flowers in them (such 
as daisies, azaleas, roses, daffodils, Canterbury bells, morning glory, 
snow-in-June, and bougainvilleas) looked so different in size, in 
shape, and in color. But they were all beautiful. These flowerpots were 
put in a well-organized way, forming in our front yard a wonderful 
garden. 

Jean told me that it was her good friend Li-Li that helped to pick and
bring the "goods" back from a familiar flower gardener. It was a 
"beautiful" bargain. All the flowerpots she had bought, including a 
dozen very small ones that she had put indoors, cost her just no more 
than NT$3,000. Well, little cost, for great pleasure! 

Jean reminded me that we had been very lucky people. For almost twenty
years we had been living in Wufeng---What a beautiful name, literally 
meaning "foggy mountain"! When we moved to this place, housing costs 
happened to be extremely low, so we could afford a three-story house. 
We were both happy about it, because it was located in a small, quiet, 
and convenient community, which was next to the so-called "culture & 
education region" and very close to the Foggy Mountain, where we 
sometimes went for a walk. 

But our front yard was not big. It was about four and a half meters wide
and five meters long, half of which had originally been used as a 
garden. When we got our first car many years ago, we had to have most 
of the garden paved to "create" a private parking lot. Therefore, the 
garden became extremely small, containing only three "trees": (1) a 
sweet-scented "osmanthus," (2) an attractive shrub called "mouse-tail" 
with its long, thin, red flowers shaped like mice' tails, and (3) a 
particular tree (name unknown!) that was now growing tall, with shiny 
leaves on its graceful branches. These three plants had made our front 
yard fairly interesting. 

And Jean had always wanted to make our place more interesting, more
beautiful, or in her words, "more romantic." As I have seen, she would 
spend lots of her "free time" on housework; she would do her best to 
tidy our dwelling place, in and out; and she would even prune the trees 
in the front yard from time to time. Of course, she would be very happy 
if I gave her a hand in what she was doing. She said she had no "green 
thumb," and she believed that pruning a tree or bush should be men's 
job, not women's. 

"A green thumb?" I once replied to her, "In my opinion, you do lack two
GREEN THUMBS, but you have eight GREEN FINGERS." 

"What do you mean?" she looked puzzled. 

"I mean you've done a very good job in gardening." I was just joking, as
"green fingers" in British English means the same as "a green thumb" in 
American English. As to whether Jean and I were good at gardening, who 
cares? 

Before Jean brought the flowerpots home last week, I had never expected
that we were going to have a really remarkable garden. Whenever she 
tried to convince me to "create" or "re-create" a "romantic" garden, I 
told her it was difficult for me to do that at the present moment. I 
had been so busy with my career work every weekday; even on weekends, I 
usually have something significant to do, such as going to church on 
Sunday. I played music for the church service, so I needed some time 
for practice in advance. As for planting flowers or grass, I thought I 
shouldn't start doing those kinds of things before retiring from my 


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