We Can Dig Them Up If We Need Them

Painting: Lente Buter (13) 

Once we bought a bunch of expensive floor tiles, indigo as the sky of Greece. The only problem was we were too busy to put them on our kitchen floor. The tiles stood in carton boxes in our garden, under our balcony. One day my husband said the tiles took so much space and that he had a great solution for this problem. He had decided to bury them in the garden.

“You want to bury the expensive tiles?” I asked.

“Yes. We can dig them up if we need them.”

The problem with my husband is that he's unstoppable if he has something in his head, so, the rest of the day he was busy digging a hole in our garden, big enough to bury all the boxes with tiles.

Sometimes I looked at him through the window of our garden. I wondered how in the world someone sane could believe this was a good idea.

At the end of the day the hole was big enough to bury all the boxes with tiles, and my husband looked very tired but content. One hour later all the boxes were buried.

That night we drank coffee in our garden and I gave it one final try, saying, "I really believe we will never see those tiles again.”

“Nonsense,” my husband said annoyed, “even archaeologists all over Europe still dig up tiles from the Romans.”

“Yeah. But all these Roman tiles are fractured,” I said.

There was a long silence between us after I had said that. We just sipped our coffee.