I spent Boxing Day in a hotel, a Christmas gift from my cousin, over 2000 metres atop Mt. Pilatus above Luzern in Switzerland.  After an afternoon in a museum of Picasso and Klee, we travelled up the mountain by cabled gondola for almost an hour over children tobogganing below.  We munched on toasted chestnuts, chucking the shells out a small transom window for the scavengers of the night.  We bobbed to the top to skies that could only end with the curvature of the earth.  Blackbirds that never leave the heights of this mountain scavenged on winter lichen frozen into the sleeping granite.  

It was as if you were free of your cramped window seat on a plane in stacked descent, and could sit on the wing.  That afternoon, the skies were as clear as the eyes of a newborn.  The lakes around Luzern were deep and blue; you could see how the city played itself into the contours of the land it had settled in.  Come nightfall, I had hoped for stars, but the lights of the top of the mountain were too strong.  But even then, there was the sense of cold, and darkness, and the wonder of how those who came before us lived in a world lit only by moonlight on snowfields.  When candles and glass in thin windows were the purview of the wealthy.  When, in the age of my grandmother, the lights of stringed pearls along the lakes below did not exist.  The landscape was covered in jewels, and I could stand in the frozen night, not being master of all I surveyed, but wonderfully grateful and humbled at the gift that had been given me.  A sumptuous dinner of excellent company and good wine fed the enchantment of this place.  Plans were laid to see it in summer.

At the deepest hour of that night, I ventured outside to a temperature of -6C.  I was wrapped well and looking for stars in the thin atmosphere.  Content to be solitary in the frozen night a few thousand metres closer to starlight far more ancient than the lights below.  There was peace and stillness and unforgiving cold.

Or so I thought.

 Within days I was on a train back to Brussels.   And a few days after that my garden was buried in snow and a cold doubly harsh to my mountain top.  The earth froze and the snow lay old and brittle on the ground, Miss Haversham’s wedding cake left to dust and grime and the cold of age.  Venturing outside was painful and for a few short winter days I thought I’d never be warm again and longed for the first sunburn of summer.

But this is the stuff of the seasons and seasons will change and the earth moves on.  This is the last chapter of The Potting Shed.   All that needed to be said has been said; it’s time to say something different, casting a new light through other windows.  In a few weeks this space will carry a new column, tentatively called “Blogging Brussels”, observations of life in Belgium generally, Brussels in particular.

I’ve been pleased and humbled that there have been those who have enjoyed these scribblings.  You validate me as a writer and I hope I have been of help as a gardener.  Kathleen has the corner on cooking, my other passion. I will sit on another corner, watch Brussels go by, and write about that.

I wish you all the greenest of thumbs and the joy of watching good things grow.  Back soon. 

Normally of an evening I like to sit out in the garden with a glass of something and the crossword, the windows open to a jazz radio station I enjoy, and my goofy dog chasing his favourite ball back and forth and barking at the goats.  The bird feeder is as crowded as a truck-stop with beautiful green finches that bully even the pigeons to scrape fallen seeds on the ground.  It is my favourite time of the day, what my mother used to call ‘goat-time’, but that is a story from another time and on a different island.  I have the goats, but not the frangipani and hibiscus blossoms of that summer, but as I stood in the kitchen doorway this evening watching the rain come down, memory took a detour and I smiled to remember another island and another garden, this one in Southeast Asia.  This garden had no goats, but it had hibiscus bushes, orchids and humming birds, but best of all, at the end of our lawn, we had a swamp.

Then, as now, we’d sit out after work with a cold glass of something, leaving the air-conditioning to the sit in the evening breeze.  Beyond the lawn, the swamp was lush with reeds and water lilies and further still, there stood the forest that lined a distant river.  At dusk, which falls with a certainty only found in the tropics, monkeys would howl and screech, chasing one another in the trees and if we were lucky, monitor lizards, some two metres long, would haul themselves out of the water to monitor the lawn below us, perhaps waiting for the neighbour’s cat to make a careless pass.  Occasionally our Chinese landlord would let his gardener come with a sharpened machete to chase after these beasts which, I was told, made for an excellent meal.  Thankfully my companion at the time was an excellent Italian cook, and monitor lizard does not taste like chicken.

But when the rains came, hard and thunderous, any willing friends that were around would don a huge old t-shirt kept for the purpose, a chair would be placed in the grass, and they were given the sublime treat of having their hair washed in the rain.  The rain came down like a warm water shower and a bucket was kept at hand in case it let up, but there is nothing so wonderfully refreshing as having ones hair washed in a rainstorm and that, followed by a gin and tonic, a meal we all cooked together and an evening of cards, made for a perfect Saturday by the South China Sea.

Over the years that followed, many of us left the tropics, promised as you do to keep in touch, meant it, and then didn’t.  Changes in life led some of us down roads we never expected and for some of us, our hair-washing days are gone for good anyway.  But for the time of our time, in that garden by the swamp, we treasured the food, the love and each other, knowing perhaps that it could never last, and so was prized in its impermanence. 

Until it’s celebrated again years later, in a kitchen doorway leading to a garden under the rains of Flanders.

Sam and Alice accepted me into their family without hesitation and without reservation, and such love is rare.  My wife had been a childhood playmate of their daughter, Adele, almost thirty years of history and affection was mine by default. I never felt I truly deserved this, but theirs was a nature that held that family extended far beyond the bounds of biology, and they had the hearts and the open arms to accommodate as many as came to their home and sat at their table. 

I shared in their history, just as the countless exchange students they hosted over the years did, and when their own children spent their own time in foreign lands, so too were those families drawn to the front porch with an open door in a leafy suburb of Baltimore.  They immediately understood my chaotic parentage and when I offered to make them the Brasilian national dish of feijoada, they jumped at it, they had been there before, an exchange student had brought them to it.

Sam played trumpet voluntaries at our wedding, I served a formal table with Keith, another exchange student/adopted son at their 35^th

wedding anniversary dinner, they shared the joy of the birth of our children, and one of my abiding memories of Sam will be the motley group of extended friends, family and children that caroled the street at Christmas-tide, Sam playing carols on his trumpet as we stopped at each house with a light in the window.  My own children took to calling him Grandpa Sam, and when my elder son took up the trumpet, and asked one summer to play Sam’s, he beamed with pride and joy. 

Sam’s memory began to fade in recent years, slowly at first, but this disease is as relentless as a glacier.  The family has worked to keep him active and vital, and that has helped, but I, who am a sporadic visitor, need to remind him who I am.  And so, one spring, in a garden now long gone, I planted forget-me-nots for Sam.  I told Alice, because I knew she would be pleased.  And she was. I have since given up that garden and have begun another.  And with the passing of my father and the loss of another beloved garden, the forget-me-nots were left behind.  But unlike memory, forget-me-nots are sturdy and spread, and one evening last weekend, lamenting the weeds I needed the time to tackle,  I noticed among them the familiar blue and pink of forget-me-nots that had somehow crept their way among the tulips.  I thought of Sam, and was grateful.

Because unlike memory, gardens revive, year after year.  My garden has always been a haven of memory of people I have loved and have gone and in that it is alive with them.  It renews itself and at the same time grows in the tracks of what came before. 

But that is what gardens should be: an inviting haven for those you love.        

Like Sam and Alice’s front porch.

Because the lamps in my living room mean that we are no longer anyone’s children.

 In the end, what you have left me, is a compass of dignity, the honour of hard work, the denial of self in the service of others, and the calm and strength that can only come from being steadfast to one’s integrity. That love is not always found in silence, but that some things are worth fighting long and hard for. As we did for each other. I honour you if I can pass this to my sons. As you did to yours. I am the son of that difficult and extraordinary woman, the one who said we are butterflies who must fly free. And, after a long and hard fought battle, I am, and always will be, yours.

Hours, she said, no more than days. He is agitated, they said, his mind halfway aboard the ship he longs to sail, and unsure of why he is still here. On a distant shore, they gather to bring him to their own. The longing to go woke him up a few nights past and told him it was time for a walk, told his useless emaciated legs to heave themselves over the bedrail and walk out. But it wasn’t time. It wasn’t yet time.

Now, Voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find.

He woke up, in the longest of an English summer afternoon, and dictated his obituary, reminded my brother of where all the papers were, to call the doctor to make sure the certificate was filled out, prepare the churchyard.

But Dad, they said, you’re not dead yet.

Damn, he said.

He is sedated now, calm as his body shuts down, organ by limb.  The peace to let his mind let go.

Hours, no more than days.

He lies in his bed in his last living room, not upstairs in the bed Mother died in, where he wanted to be. Where he missed her for so long and at night held the pillow he kept on her side of the bed.

I don’t know what she ever saw in me, he once said.

Stock options, Daddy, I said then. But I knew that he knew, because I told him, that he was the best gift she ever gave us.

Why? I asked her long ago, curled up on her lap, why did you marry him? This man who had supplanted me in her heart. He’s a good man, she said. The battle was drawn then, and it would rage for years, but it ended with two men who loved one woman ending up loving one another. I, for the care he took, and he, for the gift I grew to know. I fought long and hard to love him. They say girls want to marry a man like their father. Sometimes sons do too.

He is the last of the Titans, on whose shoulders our world was built. When he is gone, he takes the roof of that world with him.

Hours, no more than days.

Last Tuesday, running out his door, a long drive home, coming back moments later because I’d forgotten my wallet.

It wouldn’t be you if you didn’t forget something, he said

I know, Daddy, I know, I said

With the echo of the door latch, I thought I heard, goodbye Brian.

Goodbye, Daddy.

Hours, no more than days.

I have not been back to Rio in many years, though my father returned last year and still found footprints of his childhood, seventy years on. Rio has crept over our family homes, and our family graves and much of what we left has been swallowed in the tides of favelas or washed down the mountains with the rains, like the graves of my grandparents. But Jeni is still there, old and infirm but alive, the last of her generation. She still lives in house where Uncle John died half a century ago, and though it is surrounded now by the city, the bananas still bear fruit, the colours of the bougainvillea still call back to the parrots in the trees where orchids nestle, and there are still English roses thriving in a garden in the hills above the South Atlantic.

My Uncle Johnny was the closest thing I ever had to a grandfather, my mother’s father having died before I was born and my father’s father left little memory, living but his last few years in São Paulo. Johnny was my great uncle, married to my father’s aunt, but as is the case with autumn crocuses from second marriages, he and my Aunt Jessica were young enough to be the only matched set of surrogate grandparents I knew.

They came to me relatively late in a boy’s life. We had travelled Switzerland for Christmas and I remember being very shy and bored of this old couple and the stories they would share round the dinner table with my parents of extended family in Brazil, a country I only knew vaguely, and names I knew not at all until years later when I put the family tree together and they all made sense. Little makes sense to a twelve-year-old boy except that the snow was wonderful that year and that Zeus the dog was a nervous, snippy beast of a Dalmatian, and I had a great pair of boots that clacked noisily on tile floors and there was no television.

Unbeknownst to me at twelve, I had fallen in love with this country and that house that, over the years, was to become to me like a second home, a safe haven, the seeds of that largely planted by my uncle.

He was very Swiss, except when he very wasn’t. Orderly in household and business affairs, reserved but with a schoolboy’s sense of humour and a love of puns; dignified but for a naughty twinkle in his eyes under the disapproving gaze of his very English wife. He was tall and charming and when he went into town with his beige overcoat and a beret parked on the side of his head, I marvelled that I was related to such a distinguished creature. His English was punctuated with Portuguese and often produced a bewilderment of phrase: ‘Puxavida! Thees is no keeding!’

Johnny came from a well-to-do Zürich family that had provided burgomeisters and other nabobs over the centuries. His sisters were contemporaries/students of Jung, and it was expected in the family to be successful. Like his father, who went into Japan to open trade links after Perry’s gunboats, he followed the family tradition of going abroad for business. In his case, it was as a procurer of raw materials for perfume houses. This took him to Brazil as a young man, where he stayed most of his adult life, married my Aunt, raised two children, then chose to retire to his home, moving to the warmer Ticino as a concession to my Brazilian born, but very English Aunt.

The next time I saw them I was 17, with all the ripeness and itch of the boy/man. We had gone back as a last family holiday before my sister went off to university in England, and we left her with Johnny and Jessica to put her on the road to Liverpool. It was summer and there were picnics on the Lago Maggiore, the requisite stomach-churning drives up the Centovalli, lunches in obscure auberges I would come to love in later years, and the view from my uncle’s terrace across the lake to the Gambarogno.

I can’t now remember if it was that time or later visits when I was alone in the house with him. It was summer. The living room and dining room was a broad expanse fronted by a wall that was two thirds glass overlooking my aunt’s roses down to the lake and across to the mountains on the other side, the Gambarogno. A storm was passing over the lake and clouds crowded the lake and the mountain tops, and stretched languorously down the lake into Italy. There was lightening, and the rain was heavy and Johnny had put on a recording of Smetana’s Die Moldau.

The rains had swollen the rivers down the mountain, and we stood together at the window watching the storm, not a word passing between us. In that time though, he came to pass to me the music and the mountain; I came to love him. After all these years, his garden is still fertile from the cigar ends he flung there and to this day, a lit cigar takes me back to that storm and that window.

I came back over the years, many times as a retreat, and learned to listen at the dining table at the names and the stories I would later come to piece together as a family history. Through its torturous switchbacks, I discovered a single story of two families, my mother’s and my father’s that began almost a century before. Johnny and Jessica were its archivists and added to it were memories of school friends gathering there one Easter and Aunt Jessica flinging twenty franc notes out her window at us as we went out for beer at the Montanina.