You, Andrew Marvell



However, he did not give up. He brought to his wooing the same determination which had made him second gardener at the Hall at twenty-five. He was a novice at the game, but instinct told him that a good line of action was to shower gifts. He did so. All he had to shower was vegetables, and he showered them in a way that would have caused the goddess Ceres to be talked about. His garden became a perfect crater, erupting vegetables. Why vegetables? I think I hear some heckler cry. Why not flowers--fresh, fair, fragrant flowers? You can do a lot with flowers. Girls love them. There is poetry in them. And, what is more, there is a recognized language of flowers. Shoot in a rose, or a calceolaria, or an herbaceous border, or something, I gather, and you have made a formal proposal of marriage without any of the trouble of rehearsing a long speech and practising appropriate gestures in front of your bedroom looking-glass. Why, then, [vegetables?]. . . . Well, you see, unfortunately, it was now late autumn, and there were no flowers. Nature had temporarily exhausted her floral blessings, and was jogging along with potatoes and artichokes and things. Love is like that. It invariably comes just at the wrong time.

~ P. G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

*

Sirius scratched a trail of stubble along his jawline — evidence of the poor job he had done shaving — and regarded his dinner plate dubiously.  “Remus,” he said, glancing up at the man in question, “not to be a bother, but what in the hell is this?”

Taking a seat across from Sirius on the floor of the one-room cottage he’d inherited from his parents, Remus answered, “Vegetables.”  He offered Sirius an apologetic smile.  “Eat up.”

“Veggies, eh?”  Sirius prodded what he thought to be a cucumber, except that it wasn’t quite the right shade of green.  “Where from?”

Remus had a small, weedy garden along the back wall of the cottage.  He’d first planted it the spring after James and Lily were killed.  At first he’d just planted tomatoes, but soon he was growing turnips and carrots and cucumbers.  Of course, at Hogwarts, Remus had barely passed Herbology, so the vegetables tended to taste mostly like dirt.  But he’d liked the way the garden occupied his time, and vegetables were far more preferable than flowers.  He wouldn’t have been able to bear nurturing something as fragile as a flower.

“I grew them,” said Remus.  “You need vitamins.”

“They’re a little,” Sirius scrunched his nose at the plate, “florescent.”

Laughing into his fist, Remus said, “I may have attempted a spell or two to make them a little more edible.”  He picked up a bright orange carrot and held it up for inspection.  “Is it really that obvious?  Oh, I hope they’re not defective.”

Sirius plucked the carrot from Remus’s hand like it was a rose and took a bite.  “Tastes fine to me,” he commented, holding the vegetable out for Remus to try.  Going absurdly pink around the edges, a surprisingly adolescent response, Remus bit into the carrot.  It tasted like carrot-flavored dirt, which was, he supposed an improvement.

“You know what?” Sirius said, though his words were muffled as he shoved the rest of the carrot in his mouth.

“What?”

Sirius flashed a smirk that was not quite as mischievous as it once might have been, but Remus felt something long-closed inside him creak open.  “That’s our first kiss since I’ve been back,” Sirius said, “even if it was indirect.”

Even if I can see Sirius’s wrinkles and feel my aches, even if age is plain on our faces — even if I do hear time’s winged chariot at my back, Remus thought, I am content with vegetable love.