galerija/zgodba-50th-birthday-gift-for-wife.jpg
My wife turned fifty in October and she is impossible to buy for, because she genuinely wants nothing. I tried for about three weeks and got nowhere, and then one evening I stopped thinking about objects and started writing down what she had actually done. That list got long very quickly.
Two jobs at once through the nineties, the second one at night. A house we built ourselves over four summers with a borrowed cement mixer and scaffolding made out of planks. Three children who all phone on Sundays without being reminded. And a garden that took her eleven years to turn into the thing she wanted.
All of it went onto the truck.
The house sits on the flatbed and one side of it is still bare block with the scaffold up. I asked for that on purpose. It stood like that for two of those four summers and pretending otherwise would have made it a smaller story. The cement mixer is tied on next to it and her blue work coat from the night job hangs on a hook by the cab, in the right shade of blue, which I checked twice.
The number plate is our wedding date. The three bicycles on the back are the children's, in the order they arrived, and each one has a small plate with a birthday on it.
Along the whole side of the trailer it says: She built all of this.
The garden takes up more of the picture than the house does, which is correct. Tomatoes staked in rows, the plum tree she grew from a stone, the bench with the worn arms, the watering can with the dent in it, and Šapa the cat sitting upright, supervising, as she does.
I gave it to her in the kitchen at seven in the morning, because she would never have sat still for anything more formal. She looked at it for a long time without saying anything, which frightened me a bit, and then she said the only thing she could have said.
You left out the fence.