Lynda Hallinan
Call me anything, just don’t call me nice
Iknew my husband was a keeper after our third date. ‘‘I think you’re fantastic,’’ he texted as I drove home at 3am. Such heartfelt honesty! (Also, what a sterling judge of character!) However, years later he confessed that he’d opted for ‘‘fantastic’’ because the only other adjective he could confidently spell without the aid of autocorrect was ‘‘nice’’.
Nice move, old fella, for no woman wants to be called nice by a prospective partner. Smart, perhaps. Scintillating, definitely. Sassy is good, sexy is even better, but nice?
Nice is a lovely but underwhelming laudation. Niceness is a middling sort of sentiment, as heartfelt as nonchalance and indifference. Nice is an old lady in a Nicholas Sparks novel, last night’s leftovers for lunch, chivalry from a stranger or one of those Arnott’s biscuits with a stingy sprinkle of sugar on top. Nice biscuits are aptly named, if you want a plain dunker for your tea, but no one lusts after them.
‘‘That’s nice,’’ I tell my sons when they play nicely together on the trampoline.
‘‘That’s not nice,’’ I tell my sons when, suddenly but reliably, they start cage fighting and trash-talking, each accusing the other of being the worst brother in the whole world.
Reliable, as far as phlegmatic noncompliments go, is only a smidgen up the spectrum from nice. ‘‘I wish for a reliable lover,’’ said no-one ever.
Oprah Winfrey once compiled a list of reliable things. Her safe bets included wool blankets, Michelle Obama’s fashion sense, coffee, books by Alice Munro, viral cat videos and the holy trinity of salad fixings: gorgonzola, walnuts, and pears.
‘‘Being taken for granted is an unpleasant but sincere form of praise,’’ according to Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project. ‘‘Ironically, the more reliable you are, and the less you complain, the more likely you are to be taken for granted.’’
I am reliably informed, for instance, that I’m a horticultural masochist. Having agreed to open my garden next weekend for Mercy Hospice’s annual Heroic Garden Festival, I’ve spent this sweltering summer alternating between swimming and slavery. For every two days of hard slog, I earned a day off at the beach.
When Hospice asks in early spring if you’ll open your garden in late summer, one of two things will reliably occur: it will rain, or it won’t. And, because the weather gods don’t do things by halves, you can expect a deluge or a drought or a bit of both.
When it rained, it poured. When it blew, trees toppled. I raked up the foliage while my husband chainsawed the fallen branches. But the wild weather wasn’t the worst of it. That honour went to the heat: day after day of unrelenting, oppressive torridity.
As I sweated it out in the garden, a plague of black field crickets emerged from the cracks in our lawn. Thirsty rats gnawed on windfall apples. Libertine cicadas hatched from herringbone slits in my fruit trees. And when the kids left a den of jelly snakes on the back seat of my car, they melted down the black leather upholstery like a Salvador Dali painting.
Some things, at least, can be relied on when you agree to open your garden for charity. While you’re preoccupied with weeding, half a dozen courgettes will swell into caveman’s club-sized marrows. The water pump will blow its foo-foo valve, along with your husband. The pig will escape, again. Fungus will run rampant in your wildflowers, all your eggplants will wilt, the beets will bolt, the delphiniums will jump the gun and every one of the 150 white Flower Carpet roses you planted in front of your shepherd’s hut will bloom in unison, a week too bloody soon.
Said the psychoanalyst Thomas Szasz, ‘‘It is easier to do one’s duty to others than to one’s self. If you do your duty to others, you are reliable. If you do your duty to yourself, you are considered selfish.’’
On that note, now that the hard work has been done and all that’s left is rake the gravel, mulch the meadow, hang some bunting and bake several hundred scones, I’m selfishly hoping for another seven days of this super sunny weather. That would be nice.
Lynda Hallinan’s garden at Foggydale Farm, 358 Gelling Rd, Hunua, is open for the Mercy Hospice Garden Party on February 9 and the Heroic Garden Festival next weekend. Tickets $10 at the gate, or $60 for a weekend pass. See heroicgardens.org.nz for the full festival programme.