Tended with Love
A "Grace fic" by DebC
"You can open your eyes now," Bruce's voice told her, wrapping around her mind in its state of darkness like a soft, warm blanket.
Grace O'Neil Wayne opened her eyes, slowly at first, then found herself blinking in the bright sunlight. It didn't take many senses -- just smell -- to tell her where they were going. On a warm spring day, after being stuck indoors after two weeks of rain? They were in the garden.
So that part wasn't a surprise to her. The surprise -- the one her husband had promised her -- came in the form of two things in the center of the small clearing he'd led her to while sightless. A picnic laid out on a thick blanket and a lilac bush, with its roots surrounded in dirt and wrapped in burlap. Beside it were garden tools and some magazines.
"Bruce...?" she inquired, looking into his eyes to find him delighted in her reaction so far. "What's all this?"
"This..." he said, spreading his arms wide to include the small area. "Is the future site of the Grace Wayne Garden."
"The Grace... Wayne... Garden," she repeated in slow motion. "Bruce, what did you do?" What had he done? She loved the way his mind worked sometimes, but this defied logic. This was his family's garden. His mother and his grandmother had planted roses, his great-grandmother had gone to England and brought back 'old world flora' that didn't normally grow in the United States. Grace didn't know the names of them all, but they looked pretty and smelled like heaven.
"Me? Do something?" Bruce laughed lightly, happily, and kissed her cheek. "I've done nothing, love," he told her. "I just thought that if you were going to be in the garden club, you ought to have one of your own."
Grace's eyes drifted to the fledgling lilac bush, its fragile roots wrapped up for protection. She'd once told Constance that roses weren't her all-time favorite flower, though she was coming to adore them because they were such a part of the man she loved. For a moment, the thought of a little corner of this fabulous garden all her own entered her mind-- the scent of lilacs mingling with the roses and the other flowers--and all she could do was smile. "Bruce..." she murmured happily as she turned to kiss his cheek. "Thank you," she added and then turned a more sensible eye to the plant. "I don't know the first thing about gardening, you know."
Bruce chuckled at her mildly teasing voice. "You're a quick study, love; you'll learn. And until you do, our groundskeepers can keep it for you." He accentuated this statement by kissing her lips gently. "I thought you could start by helping me plant this one today, and then we can discuss the landscaping for the rest over lunch." He nodded to the picnic blanket and gave her hand a squeeze.
Grace had no doubt that she could learn. But nothing touched her more than the rest of his statement. It wasn't that he'd offered to give her the first lesson himself. No that wasn't really it. What touched her to her very heart was that her garden would begin with the two of them together. Their hands, their minds and souls working as one... and Grace knew that their love would make her corner of an already perfect heaven blossom into something spectacular. And it would continue to bloom, too, for generations to come, just like the works of her predecessors... tended with love.
