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When Fred got down on one knee and asked her to marry him, Susan had burst into tears. Not tears of joy—well, not merely tears of joy—but also tears of bitter regret. “I wasted so much time,” she had sobbed as Fred jumped to his feet, alarmed. “We could have been together so much sooner!”
“Babe, babe,” Fred had said, gathering her up, “no, babe, no.” He rocked her in his arms. “This is the right time, this is the only time. You didn’t know who you were, I didn’t know who I was. There’s no such thing as wasted time for us, babe.” He squeezed her tight. “So is that a yes, Suzie-Q?”
And she had laughed through her tears and said that of course it was a yes, a thousand times yes, yes forever.
She had fallen in love with Fred during a guest lecture, although she wouldn’t realize it for years. They’d had a deal, he’d go to the lectures about math with her, and she’d go to the soil science lectures with him. And after he’d patiently sat through an hour and a half on Riemannian geometry, she felt honor-bound to return the favor and go to the lecture he wanted to hear on soil conservation.
She had barely understood a word of it—in fact, she’d spent most of it working on a theorem in her head, equations and manifolds dancing in her mind like airy sprites. But after the lecture they went out for coffee and Fred had tried to explain it to her, his blunt capable hands tracing enthusiastic shapes in the air as he’d talked about no-till farming and crop rotation and tried to make her see it as he did, the cycles of it, the renewal. “And it’s not just for the soil,” he said. “Cover crops like clover provide space for biodiversity too. The beetles, the mice, the bees—bees, Suzie!” He’d always been the only person who could get away with calling her Suzie. “We need more bees. I know some farmers resist letting fields lie fallow, they think it’s a waste, but it’s necessary.”
”’To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven?’”
He’d chuckled. “Whoever wrote Ecclesiastes was a soil scientist.”
”I think that was Solomon.”
”The wisdom of Solomon!” he announced, triumphant, and she had listened to his rich deep laugh and tried not to realize she was in love with him. And she’d succeeded for so long.
Now she gets up from her marital bed in the gray of early dawn and goes to the window. Behind her, Fred’s rattling little snore rises and falls reassuringly. The air outside smells of grass and clover and earth. The bees are waking up with the sun, on their way to gather pollen from the clover in the fallow fields, concentrating that sweetness into gold and storing it away for future delectation. She closes her eyes and feels the tiny soft feet of mice pattering through the fields, the hawks seeking them as they circle overhead, the ants creeping out among the roots to search for seeds. There’s no such thing as wasted time, she thinks.
Then she turns back to her husband, to the love that has waited quietly for them through bud and blossom and fruit.