Bleeding Hearts

My dad grew up in the city. He spent his summers up in Chatham, supposedly doing country boy things. But they were vacation country boy things. My mom, on the other hand, grew up in the country. Her parents had a cow for milk, chickens for eggs and a garden for vegetables. My mom wore navy blue tights that dyed her legs blue when they got wet ordered from the Simpsons catalogue, but many of her clothes were handmade. Or hand-me-downs.
My mom's chores involved things like weeding a garden. My father's did not.

Fast forward thirty or forty years. My mom and dad have met, married and had two children. They've had a house with a large vegetable garden, cared for by my grandfather, my mother and occasionally, my brother and I, though mostly we just eat all the peas. We have moved into a new house with a huge lawn and flower beds, but no fence, so no garden. My mom takes great pride in finding things that will grow in these little patches around the yard.
One day, she arrives home and in the garage, in her wheelbarrow, are her bleeding hearts.
It's June. They were in full bloom, dripping with blossoms.
My father cut them down. And it wouldn't have been easy either since he couldn't just mow them over, which was the fate of my mother's rose bush ten years before. This act of mutiny in the garden took forethought and planning. Which is my mother is foaming at the mouth, muttering something involving the words blooms, stupid, man and blind.
I decide it is best to leave for a bit and let my mom exact her revenge. I can hear her in the desk next door, rifling for something in my craft and school supplies, still muttering. I wait before descending to the kitchen.
There, on the table, are the bleeding hearts. The table has been spread with a garbage bag. At the head of the table, at my usual seat, is a looseleaf gravestone that reads, "RIP Bleeding Hearts."
I smiled at my mom. And then I left because I didn't need to see my father's reaction.

Years later, I will tend toward the dramatic when my own husband causes me to rage against the stupidity of man. I will tell him, quite uncharitably, that our daughter could have died because he didn't put the car seat back together properly (instead of noting that he did a fabulous job freeing it of cracker crumbs). That I will fall down the stairs and kill myself if he keeps turning out the light before I make it up the stairs. That I am only doing these things to make an impression, to remind him that he really should get out the instruction manual for the car seat. That, despite his last name, he doesn't have to be a stereotypical cheap Scot about the electrical bill when it comes to two minutes of light. That, while he's unlikely to pull out the carrots instead of the weeds in our vegetable garden, he's still male and he'll still manage to do something that makes me crazy just because I'm female.