I hate wearing gloves when I’m gardening. I know it can be really bad for your hands and nails.
But I just love to touch things.

I love feeling squishy dirt between my fingers. Leaves crunch under my palms. Cold mud smeared on my skin. I love the feeling of waxy leaves, velvety petals, juicy succulents, smooth hard sticks, crumbly rough bark, firm packed earth. All nature’s erotic textures.

I raked up the rainbow of autumn leaves strewn over our lawn. I made a mountain as high as my waist. And I started to fling handfuls of leaves into the bin.

Half way through, I paused. My still arms outstretched.

I watched in slow motion as my wedding ring flew off my finger. It tumbled gracefully through the air. I watched it pause in space, twinkling in the mid-morning sun, before plummeting to the earth like a burning rocketship to hell, straight into the pile of leaves.

I swear it slid its way to the bottom. Into a little pocket between the fabric of time itself. I must’ve spent hours sitting there in the dirt, turning over every single leaf. One by one. Golden flecks of dead leaves mocking my patience. Little beetles nipping at my ungloved hands. Leaf after leaf. One after the other. My mind was numb.

And there it sat. Under the 4,536th leaf. Glinting a cold metal glint, before warming up between my fingers to become mine again. My unsolicited needle/haystack meditation exercise was over for the week.

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