My wife slept next to the bedroom window that looks out on the garden where I had left our Shasta daisies in a plastic pot. I dug up a part of the front yard where the new steps are going to be built. My wife had planted the daisies in a little garden space I reclaimed from the forest, but now they were in the way of the new stairs and had to be dug up and transplanted. The shovel cut into the roots so the flowers wilted outside of the window where she slept.

I sat on the bed watching her and waited for her to take the next breath. Her body was outlined under the blanket and she was still. Was she breathing at all, I wondered. What if she wasn't breathing? What if my wife never took the next breath? I would be left sitting in bed sipping my cold coffee next to her lifeless body and then what would happen to me? What would become of my life if she never took the next breath? What would happen to her daisies if they couldn't root in the pot I found for them? I waited and I can't say I waited with ease. Who would tend our garden? What would happen if she never took the next breath?

But she did. Her body moved under the blanket and I, too, took the next breath. "Hi, babe," she said in a voice that was still talking from her dreams.

"Hi, babe," she said from another world where time stands still and dream time is no time at all.

The veil is thin at these moments. The narrow edge between life and lifelessness is fine. Before we start to speak and between breaths there is a moment when life stands still and the blood stops its ceaseless exploration.

I watched her and she watched me from her pillow with her thick, waist-length hair still in a furious and silent scramble across her face. I wanted to touch her, just inches away from me, but I hesitated. I wanted to feel her warm flesh under my strong hands and it would soothe both of us, but I hesitated. If I brushed aside the moment with a word or a caress it would break the spell, and life would be taken for granted.

"You're up so early. You didn't get enough sleep," she said as she stretched to her full length under the blanket and clawed the hair away from her face.

"I'm going out to my office," I said.

"But you've been up for two hours. You worked so hard on the stairs yesterday and now you won't let yourself rest."

"I haven't been up that long. Its been less than an hour," I said. I had made the coffee and put on my glasses and shaved. I do my best work in the early mornings but I like to sip the coffee sitting next to her while she sleeps.

"Its alright," my wife said. "Go ahead."

I put on the clothes I had dropped on the bedroom floor the night before and walked barefoot through the backyard redwood forest to my office. Later in the day I will go to town and buy her an African violet for her desk window and a barrette for her hair.

My wife's birthday is on Sunday. We will have a birthday party on the deck. Our Shasta daisies outside the bedroom window will be there.

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