mollycoddling

Parents always wonder if they are spoiling their baby by picking her up when she cries. I was totally anxious about this myself – the little one wanted to be held at all hours and I obliged and then worried that I was ruining her for life. One Saturday morning, I read that a famous child psychologist was fielding questions by phone. I called, got through to him, presented my dilemma.

Well now, he said and I could almost hear him yawn. What do you think you should be doing?

I nearly hung up on him. Much later, I understood why he asked what he did.

Anyway, I kept picking the girls up and they seem to have survived and developed glorious and independent lives and still I read in various news sources that people continue to ask this same old question.

But on the issue of flowers, I never had any doubt. Flowers love to be mollycoddled and you cannot spoil them by it: feed them when they're hungry, water them early or late in the day, snip them, tuck them in with a warm something or other for the winter – and they’ll be so much the better for it!

So, anticipating the heat today (again! How many times have I said to Ed – this will be the last hot day of the summer, only to be proven wrong...), I was up early watering my mollycoddled beauties. And admiring the many that are still popping out with smiling, charming, colorful faces.

Both Ed and I join my older daughter (the same one who caused me all that worry more than thirty years ago) at the market.

(It's a hot day. Vendors refresh themselves. With cucumbers if nothing else...)

At Matt’s stand, we admire the eggplant. The one dibbed “looks like Nixon” sells quickly. I’m not sure if it’s because of the profile, or the fact that it’s a healthy looking piece of vegetable.


 

We talk to Matt and his selling pal George H. about their forthcoming travels. And I ask Ed why he has become so disinclined to go anywhere this summer, this fall.

Because it’s so beautiful here.

Silly reason! Of course it’s beautiful! And it will be beautiful when we return!

You go. Sometimes Ed worries that I am not enough like him, at other times he worries that I am becoming too much like him. You like to travel.

And so I hatch some plans for some time in a month or two. Can’t do anything now. Busy with work, with wedding anticipations. After that, I tell myself, I need to head out. Only to return after to the loveliest farmhouse this side of any ocean.