Sometimes, we find that we are not in as favourable a situation in life as we had wished. Elizabeth felt that this was her case.
When one went through big life changes such as hers – loyal wife and lovely, capable mother of four relocating everything, including her own soul in relation to herself and her god – it took a great deal of courage and trust to hold her shaking limbs and heart and continue to find a way out.
Elizabeth finally met a nice guy through friends in early 2011, after unsuccessful tries on Internet. She was such a romantically powerful woman that she could easily overlook the difficulties of being hundreds of miles away from her new lover. She lived in Cayuga Heights, a suburb of Ithaca in New York, while Patrick Simard lived in Burlington, a US city close to the border of Quebec. He taught at Université De Quebec À Montréal before becoming a professor of sociology at The University of Vermont in 2002. He had never married and had no kids; Patrick came to Elizabeth’s world by a rare lucky chance.
After the prolonged after-effects of divorce – sleepless nights, endless dates and cups of coffee, disturbing and upsetting arguments about right and wrong – Elizabeth felt happy and relaxed with Patrick. Patrick suited her. He could engage her in long, interesting conversations and offer her food for thought in a scholarly way. Patrick, on the other hand, found Elizabeth passionate and interesting, trusting and daring, and above all, intuitive.
Spring came especially early in 2012. Early spring in Montreal means the beginning of May, when people start shopping for their gardens. Ou Yang had a little garden at the back of her cottage where the perennials were starting to bud. She frowned, though, seeing them grow so quickly overnight in the rising temperatures and nourishing warm rains; she had no time to look after them, nor was she in the mood to do anything else than get by her job and life with her son
The previous year, her friend Simone did some thing revolutionary to her own garden, after tearing out the grass completely, designed and executed a natural garden plan with the help of her adult son. She then started planning for the last long and narrow piece of land that ran along the side of her building, adjacent to her neighbor’s on the left. A train of bush half-dead from bugs and exposed roots served as The Middle Line dividing the two properties. The grass was scarce and eaten away by the persistent dandelions. Simone hated to have to keep two lawn mowers, one for the patch and one for the edges. She planed to get rid of the ugly grass and heavy lawn mowerscompletely.
One day, Simone found the kind of plant that suited her purposes. This plant would spread to cover the ground, instead of growing so tall that she’d have to cut them every ten days. Now, she could finally get rid of the dirty, hard-to-start mower. She went to Home Depot, Reno-Depot, and all the other garden centers, and bought all the thyme off their shelves. She planted two hundred roots of thyme on this piece of land, measuring one meter in width and thirty meters in length.
Thyme was chosen among many other climbing plants and they were planted on May 18th that year. They grew so fast that they soon covered the spaces in between in just a month and half. Nature displayed all its charm and power in such a short time.
Ou Yang did not show much of her happiness with new boyfriend François. Maybe it was because she was too busy with her job and son to have time to stop for even a second to enjoy her new state of mind, or even new ways of sex. Or maybe it was because she was still in a testing period when she was not allowed to release herself completely to enjoy!
Chinese do not ever talk about sexual feelings to any one – not to family, not even to friends. So no one could really know how she really felt sexually about François, except from her complaints that her husband Ge Wen was not doing much in the couple years before things blew up.
When the long expected dream came true for Ou Yang, the charm of the dream suddenly disappeared, which made Ou Yang even more perplexed and frustrated….
