They called her “Wildflower” because she loved the woods.

More than her home.

There were so many decisions in a house like where to put the couch when to buy it how much to pay for it.

Trees in the forest just grew free their shape and size dependent on how they reached toward the sun.

Light flitters through leaves where and when it wants.

No one grooms chooses or cuts them yet they are beautiful.

Peaceful.

She was never a city girl.

Never wanted to be.

She too had grown un-landscaped her form dependent on how she reached for G-d.

For years she didn’t notice what her house looked like. People walked through her door found places to sit and eat. Light shone through where and when it wanted. Though she didn’t choose it the furniture was just right.

Peaceful.

Until the day the couch broke in half.

The old couch was soft and comfortable in unassuming colors.

Now she’d have to buy a couch. Buying a couch meant going into the city into well-manicured stores and model showrooms every piece of furniture more beautiful than the next.

How to choose? Based on money beauty comfort style or color?

For years these things had all been decided for her taken care of themselves.

Somehow this couch thing had brought accusations like the snake in the Garden of Eden.

It asked questions pointed fingers. “How didn’t you ever think to buy a couch before? Why didn’t you care how it looked? What kind of person are you?”

There’s a floor model on sale but the color!

Can’t a couch just come and plant itself and somehow take root in the soil of her home and — like all things in the woods — come to blend in?

Is it because there is peace in the forest that everything matches so perfectly?

Is there enough peace in her home to match this unusual-colored floor model?

Could a couch really take over her mind after all these years of never even noticing of letting things in and out like wind-borne seeds?

But maybe it’s her job to mold the shape of her home. If the floor model is half the price good quality and comfortable isn’t it her job to not strain the budget?

But doesn’t beauty count?

All new questions as if just now her eyes were open after having eaten from the Tree of Good and Evil.

Next to her home G-d planted a small patch of trees. She went and sat there.

She sat there for hours watching the light move through the tree’s branches. Watching how and where shadows fall.

Only here could she find peace.

It wasn’t the couch that bothered her but the fact that now she’d have to define herself.

Was she a modern couch? A comfortable couch? A moderate cheap or expensive couch? Or a showroom special?

The man in the store clinched the deal “This is the last and only couch you can have immediately; it’s the showroom special.”

Her husband signed the checks in the office. She stayed with the couch.

She was happy she’d helped her husband’s pressures. But could she live with this couch?

She didn’t sleep all night the night the couch was delivered.

She paced the floors of the living room until her husband called downstairs at 3 a.m. “Where are you?” he asked the echoes of G-d’s question when His creations weren’t in their proper place in Eden.

“Trying to like the couch.” The words slipped out of her mouth

She’d wanted to be a heroine. The how-to-sacrifice-to-save-money wife. But it wasn’t working. The couch was too wildflower-bright and too big and too high.

Maybe I can return it.

But then she’d be that kind of wife an ungrateful-for-the-showroom-special wife.

It would have to be one of those melancholy endings. She resigned herself.

A few days passed she sat on the couch and started to like it. Really like it. She’d repeat the thought she’d learned from the woods — how there everything matches because there’s peace. And where there’s peace everything matches even the incongruent colors of a wildflower.