Episode 2: The Passion That Was Sleeping Deep Inside Me

"Can you even take care of it?"
I can see it now—you'll get obsessed with roses and stop doing your chores around the house.
What will you do if you buy something that expensive and it dies? You're bound to ruin it anyway.
I will absolutely not tolerate you neglecting your household duties."

……Again.

The same old words I'm tired of hearing. But this time, for some reason, it felt different.

"Damn it!!" "I'm working so hard, yet all you do is complain!! What is your problem!!"

After screaming in my heart, for the first time, I stood my ground and talked back to my husband.

"I want to grow roses! You don't know if I'll kill them or not unless I try!"
The old me would have swallowed my frustration, gritted my teeth, and endured it.

I had fallen in love with roses, and I wasn't going to give in!
And so, I dragged my husband along to a flower shop for the first time.
"I wonder how much a rose seedling costs...?"

Looking at the colorful seedlings, the first thing that hit me was
the price!

I couldn't help but scream in my heart, "Whoa! That's expensive!" (lol)
Besides, I'd often heard that roses are difficult to grow, and the anxiety of "What if I kill such an expensive thing right away..." washed over me, making me lose my nerve.

From the back of the flower shop,
"Hey. Isn't this yellow rose cute?"
An unexpected reaction from my husband! I had an ulterior motive: if I bought a rose he liked, maybe he'd cooperate with my gardening in the future.

And so,
my first rose became Graham Thomas, not the Pierre de Ronsard I had fallen in love with at first sight. Still, I was satisfied.

From then on, even though I used to wake up at the last minute and rush to get to work,
before I knew it, I was waking up at 4:00 every morning.
By the time I finished making breakfast and lunch for six people, it was finally getting light outside. Then, I would quickly head out to the garden to admire my roses.
I would go to my full-time job, and after coming home in the evening, it was back to making dinner and doing laundry.
I was doing my absolute best to fulfill my "proper" duties as a housewife so my family wouldn't complain.

But—.
Even so, I would stand in the garden at night.
Wearing a headlamp, I would plant rose seedlings or arrange bricks in the dark garden.
The time I spent alone, silently facing the soil, brought my heart back to life.
In the pitch-black garden, the sound of my large shovel
"thud, thud..." echoed loudly.
I laughed to myself, imagining that if the neighbors got suspicious and thought I was burying a body, it would be because I watched too many TV dramas.
From inside the house, I could hear my husband yelling, "Enough is enough!"
But in the garden, I could express what I "loved" without holding back for anyone.
It was something I decided I wanted to do!
Something I desperately wanted to do!
The passion that had been sleeping was quietly, surely, waking up—.

To be continued...