My husband and I live in a quiet village nestled between green hills and golden wheat fields. Life here is slow, simple, and predictable. He works long hours on a nearby farm, and I keep our small home warm and our garden blooming. We don’t have much, but we have peace.
Or at least, we had peace — until the day my mother-in-law moved in.
She’s always lived in the city with my husband’s younger brother, where life is faster, louder, and more in tune with her personality. We’ve never gotten along. From the very beginning, she made it clear she didn’t think I was good enough for her son. Her eyes were always sharp, scanning me for flaws. Her words, even when polite, dripped with something cold — sarcasm, superiority, something unnamed but heavy.
But I endured it. For love.
My husband, bless him, never saw the worst of it. He assumed she was just a little difficult. “That’s how she is,” he’d say with a shrug. “Don’t let it get to you.”
But then, three weeks ago, my brother-in-law called. Their apartment building had been sold. The city was becoming too expensive. She needed a place to stay — just for “a while.” And we were the only option.
I plastered a smile on my face when she arrived, bags in hand and disapproval already written all over her face. She wrinkled her nose at our cottage, at the scent of herbs drying by the window, at my muddy boots by the door. “It’s very… rustic,” she said.
That first week, I bit my tongue more than I spoke. She criticized the meals, rearranged my kitchen, and insisted the water pressure was inhuman. She took over the living room and told me the garden was “a little too wild.” I cried in the shed more than once.
But something shifted last Thursday.
She followed me outside while I was tending to the carrots, arms crossed and expression bored. I thought she’d start in on how “a proper woman” wouldn’t have dirt under her nails.
Instead, she knelt beside me — stiffly — and asked, “What’s that smell?”
I looked at her, confused. “You mean the basil?”
She nodded. I offered her a leaf. She chewed it slowly, then said, “My grandmother used to grow basil on her windowsill. In the old apartment. Before everything changed.”
And just like that, the walls cracked. She started joining me outside more often. I found her once sipping tea under the pear tree, eyes closed like she belonged there. She even apologized — clumsily, awkwardly, but it was something. “I judged you,” she said. “I thought you were simple. But maybe… maybe simple isn’t so bad.”
Now we sit together some afternoons, watching bees dance on lavender. She still complains sometimes — she probably always will — but there’s softness there I’d never seen before.
Maybe peace isn’t the absence of tension. Maybe it’s what grows after the soil’s been turned.