Dear Lavender

Dear Lavender

************

The desk was overflowing with letters and scrolls. Lavender sighed heavily before sitting down; feeling slightly desperate she leaned back in her chair and just stared at them. Where to begin? Always begin at the beginning, her mother had told her when she was a child. Such a silly advice -especially when you couldn't see a beginning at all. Just chaos.

It was her first day back at work after the holiday. The post owls hadn't taken the time off though, as her desk clearly showed. Stuffing a piece of fudge in her mouth, she picked up one of the letters. A rather small one, pink, with a sweet smell of roses that reminded Lavender of the childhood summers in her parent's garden.

"Dear Lavender.

My boyfriend has started to avoid me. Yesterday, when we..."

Lavender put the letter aside. She might as well use the morning to go through them all, categorise them and put them in their separate boxes. Boyfriend-problems in the blue box, lost relatives in the green box, career advises in the yellow box, and so on.

When all the mail had been opened, she decided to finish her column for The Daily Prophet. She had a weekly column there, Ask Lavender, which had grown more and more popular over the last six months. Perhaps because she always had a well thought-out answer to every issue people brought up, or perhaps because of the open tone she had when she wrote the introductory post. She often used scenes from her and Dean's relationship to illustrate her points, and Dean's friends used to joke about that and call him Mr Brown. Dean himself just shrugged and grinned -the dear man.

She grabbed the quill and absentmindedly started chewing on it. She'd had her holiday more than a month before the common summer holiday started, and had made a deal with the editor to write a holiday special. It was a fact, after all, that the divorce rate peaked after each long holiday. Differences have a tendency to become obvious when people, who otherwise have quite a lot in common, are forced to spend a long period crammed together on a small surface.

Like on a sailing boat.

Lavender started writing. The quill moved quickly across the paper; all those small advises she had picked up over the years poured out on the paper, and after an hour she had a nice little essay. She read it over and nodded; this would certainly please the editor.

Then it was time to add her own thoughts and experiences. Absentmindedly, she drew a tiny horse on the bottom of the letter, and with a wave of her wand the little animal got life and rose from the paper. Shaking his mane, he galloped across her desk until he came to the end, where he took a leap into the thin air and disappeared in a whiff of white smoke. Lavender once more took up the quill, and slowly started writing.

'Sometimes it can be difficult', she wrote. 'Difficult to remember that number one rule of communication. When you have worked for an entire year, toiled and laboured for petty cash and, once again, been forgotten when your boss dealt out promotions -all you want is to get away and just relax and forget about it all... That is the time when your soul mate comes and announces that he's bought himself a sailboat.

Since you're a loving and understanding spouse, you applaud his decision and tell him what a fantastic idea it was. You tell him how clever he is, and that now you can eat fish four times a week and save a lot of money. You don't tell him that sailboats make you seasick and that the closest you'd like to get to water is sitting on the beach, sunbathing. You don't tell him that you never really cared much for fish.

And why don't you say all those things? Why don't you speak up? Because you're tired, tired after a whole year with bickering and cold wind and dirty laundry and bills -it's summer, and life is short. So you swallow every sour comment and smile, before you go into the garden to sit back in your chair and put your feet up.

Then he suggests you go on a holiday with him, on this boat. You can see it on his face that this means a lot to him and you agree, even though it's the last thing you want. Anything to keep the peace. And the trip is just as horrible as you'd expected; you spend half the time running around, trying to be of help, and the remaining three days hanging over the side of the boat, being violently sick into the deep green water.

In the end you put up your last reserves and Apparate to a small French village on the Normandy coast, and with the last Muggle pounds you have, you get yourself a room in a small inn which smells of boiled cabbages and cat. You lie for two days on a bed in the small bedroom with pink wallpaper before you start to feel human again.

And then he finds you. You're sitting in the cafeteria across the street, slowly trying to get you stomach to accept the idea of food again, when he comes in and gives you a reproachful look. "Where the hell have you been?" he barks at you. "I was worried sick! Are you trying to give me a heart attack?"

And when you carefully slip the news that sailing isn't really your type of leisure, he stares at you with astonishment. "Why didn't you just say so?" he asks.

And that is a good question.'

Lavender looked down at the paper, then picked it up, curled it into a ball and threw it in the wastebasket. She dipped the tip of the quill into the ink, and returned to a new sheet of paper.

'Sometimes, even for couples who love each other very much, having separate holidays might not be such a bad idea.'