Sense

SENSE

AT FIRST, Janie Lemon-Lime did not know how many sounds there were in the universe, and so she began to count them. She loved all the variety of tone--the highs and the lows, the long and the short, and the deep and the soft and the silent. But after a number of days of counting, she found that the counting was beginning to interfere with her hearing of the actual sounds, and so she stopped counting altogether and just listened.
Later, when she began counting the colors that were in the sky and the earth and the water and the air and the plants and the animals--with all their variety of shape and texture, depth and size, and, of course, tone too--the same thing happened again: counting interfered with the seeing. And so, once more, she stopped counting and instead just looked.
Janie did not even bother trying to count the other senses that she was coming to love because she knew that the counting was not nearly as important as the touching and smelling and the tasting. And so, as before, she just entered into the experience of those experiences.
Janie’s husband’s name was Gary Lime. When she married him, she added his last name to her last name to form the hyphenated Lemon-Lime. Because Gary loved her so much, he decided to take her maiden name to add to his own last name. Hyphenated, he became Gary Lime-Lemon, which, people noted when they were introduced, was much more difficult to pronounce than his wife’s more beautiful and smooth-sounding Lemon-Lime. Gary said not to worry; it would just take some getting used to.
Janie and Gary, like many couples who marry, talked about having children. It was not a lengthy discussion, but it was an important one nonetheless, one that brought back a decision in the affirmative: They would bring off-spring into the world. What took much longer to work out, however, was the last name that any future children would take: Lemon-Lime, Lime-Lemon, or even just Lemon or Lime, by itself. At first, the discussion seemed to be going along quite well, each of the future parents bringing up the points of each side of each choice. But when it came right down to making the actual decision, they could not agree. They each held a separate--and firm--position on the matter, but--for the sake of harmony–-neither would state it. For they each suspected, at each other’s core, was a basic disagreement.
And so they decided to just sit on it for awhile. Which made sense. The issue was not pressing. They had no kids; they were not even pregnant yet. They could talk about it later.
When they did talk about it--later--they decided that if they could not agree on this one very important issue, perhaps they should just not have any children at all. This worked fine for awhile. But eventually, love got the best of them, and they found themselves with child.