Delicious and bittersweet

Yesterday was our fifteenth (and last) wedding anniversary. We celebrated it by going to Tamarine, a wonderful Vietnamese fusion restaurant in Palo Alto.

The food was amazing, and as a craftsperson I was fascinated by this ice cube, frozen with their logo:

The company was wonderful too. Here we are, back home afterwards.

It’s hard to imagine that we’ve been married for 15 years, and together nearly 20 years. It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, but it also feels like forever. We have shaped each other over the last two decades! It’s hard to imagine life as a single person again.

We are both sad to be parting ways, even though we know it’s the right thing and we’re both looking forward to our future lives.

I’ve been saying bittersweet goodbyes to other things as well. We’re moving and selling our house, which means giving up the garden. We planted eleven fruit trees when we bought the house. I remember when they were tiny saplings, and now they’re full-grown trees. (One of the avocado trees is over twenty feet high!) And they produce delicious fruit all year long.

Last month was blueberries, the first fruits of spring:

This month it’s apriums (apricot plum hybrid) and mulberries:

Next month we’ll be bombarded with Santa Rosa plums, my very favorite plum variety – sweet, tart, and luscious. As one farmer told me, “If you don’t like Santa Rosas, you don’t like plums!”

The plums carry us into tomato season:

In early fall, it would have been Concord grapes, like these:

…but we just took out the grapes in favor of a passion fruit vine and a white guava tree. I am sad we’ll miss those!

In late fall, it’s Meyer lemons. These are a cross between a lemon and a mandarin – sweeter and fruitier than normal lemons, with a thin, incredibly fragrant skin.

We also get two kinds of persimmons – Fuyu (the flat ones) and Hachiya (the slurpy ones).

Then in the winter, the avocados, kumquat, yuzu, and bergamot provide for us.

And that brings us back to spring and blueberries!

Finally, we planted roses lining the entire front yard, all selected for fragrance as well as beauty. They are wonderful – when I pick a bouquet you can smell them all the way across the room. I’ve had complete strangers come up to me and thank us for planting the roses, because everyone enjoys them so much.

Here are the rosebushes along the driveway – there are lots more along the sidewalk.

And lilacs, and irises….

It will be hard to leave all that behind. It’s not just a garden; it’s something we’ve tended lovingly for a long time, and which has rewarded us in return. Much like our relationship.

But all things come to an end. D doesn’t want to stay here and I can’t afford to buy her out, so we’re selling the house and moving.

There will be other gardens, and perhaps other relationships, in our future, of course. This is not really the end. But this entire summer is a delicious and bittersweet goodbye.