The Greenhouse In February
The greenhouse was Harold's, but in February it had become hers.
She went out to it in the middle of the morning with the blue pruning shears in the pocket of her coat and with the thermos of coffee she had stopped drinking herself and had started making for the smell, because the smell of coffee in the kitchen reminded her of forty-eight years of Harold coming in from the greenhouse at eleven and sitting at the table opposite her and not saying very much, which had been, she had come to understand only recently, one of the principal pleasures of her life.
The snow against the glass walls was up to the third pane on the north side and to the second pane on the south. Harold had built the greenhouse in 1987 on the concrete pad where the old chicken coop had stood, and he had built it low, because the winds in that part of Wisconsin came off the lake and a tall greenhouse would have come down in the first January. It was twelve feet by sixteen. Inside, on this particular morning, it was fifty-two degrees, which she knew because the thermometer Harold had hung from the central beam in 1989 was still working, and which she thought was on the cool side for the tomatoes.
The tomatoes were his particular project. He had been growing them under glass in February for, she calculated, nineteen years. He had chosen the varieties carefully. There was one from a seed catalogue in Oregon