While you are sleeping

One evening the Hero and I were repeating a conversation we had already had that morning, which he claimed we had NOT had. 


"I told you this when I said goodbye this morning," I reminded him.


"I'm still asleep when you say goodbye in the morning," he said. 


"But you always tell me I look nice. So you must be sort of awake."


" 'Cuz you always look nice," he said. "But this is what I see when I'm still in bed and you tell me you're leaving." He made a motion with his hand resembling a quacking duck bill. 


"I look like a duck to you?"


"Not so much a duck...just a talking head."


"Sooo...you think a talking head looks nice?"


"I really don't hear much of what you're saying in the morning," he said, ignoring my question. "You're probably saying something like" -- here he made the quacking duck motion again -- " 'Honey, I'd like to buy a hundred plants for the garden. Is that okay?' and I say 'Mmm hmm, sure, have a good day bye zzzzz.' "


"You hear more than you think. I did say that this week."


He looked alarmed.


"Just kidding," I said.


He does well to be alarmed, though. Although I have little of the traditional female interest in acquiring shoes, I harbor a secret desire to kidnap all the flowers from the nurseries around us and take them home for our yard. And not just flowers. It is getting harder to not trip on the numerous buckets, pails, chairs, benches, ladders, and decorative things sticking out of the ground that I've gradually acquired for our small space.


Yesterday I noticed, for the first time, that there are two nails sticking out of the mortar by the back door.


"Hey,there's a nail up there," I said to the Hero. "We could hang a metal star or something on it. And there's another one over there -- maybe we could get another flower basket..."


The Hero laughed nervously.


I smiled to reassure him, and changed the subject.


But I'll have to take it up again with him in the morning.