Roses in the Wreckage

It started with a puppy, and ended with hello.

Monty didn’t run with the pack of other puppies but the day I came to pick one, he was eventually found, shivering and frightened, hiding behind boxes in the garage.  Love was instant and everlasting.  He soon adjusted to the open space of my garden and with age and confidence he began exploring the neighborhood.  It was soon clear a fence would be required.  I put this off for way too long until a knock on the door started a chain of events likened to that butterfly in the Amazon that spawned Hurricane Katrina.

One of the first expressions I picked up in Flemish off Cartoon Network was “Ik bin bang”; “I’m afraid.”  So when I opened the front door that afternoon, to a rather frightened woman who I had sometimes seen in the lane that ran next to my house, I understood that she was frightened of dogs, and had been all her life.  I also knew that I feared another knock on the door, the one that would bring tragic news, because I didn’t keep Monty safe. 

 Come a warm, dry day last September, a friend and I installed a simple and cheap affair of spikes, wire and a gate you could buy off the shelf at Brico.  Monty was curtailed, but safe, and I no longer had the worry about him running out into the road.  Which was just as well, because it saved room for the mountain of worry that was to come.  Unbeknownst to us, one of the pikes we shoved into the ground hit a shallow oil line that ran from the underground tank to the furnace in the cellar.  It was a small line, and no wider than a toothbrush, one centimetre either way would have missed it.   Except it didn’t.  One month later, 1500 litres of oil had leaked into the ground.  My worries were to be somewhat more substantial than no heat or hot water as winter settled in.

The Belgian environmental authorities must, by law, be notified of such incidents.  The contaminated soil has to be excavated, is washed if possible, and replaced.  I don’t know if this was done in my case.  However, this is a very expensive process, and in rural areas such as mine where buried oil tanks are still common, there is insurance for such eventualities.  The Hippocritical Oath for insurance companies is “First, Do Not Pay Out”, so this is currently under negotiation.   But the surrounding soil had to be dug out to a depth of 6 metres, and this also meant the garage had to be demolished, to get to the earth underneath.  Thus, what once was a healthy plot

Had become rubble.

And a crater.

But as these machines violated my soil and ripped out the work I had put in, so they tore down walls that might have taken years to unbrick.  This is Flanders, where you may have a nodding acquaintance with your neighbours years before you know their names, but my neighbours came by, those who could see the garden through the fences, and knew of my love and care, and lamented its loss while sharing the joke of the new swimming pool I was having dug.  They introduced themselves by first name, unheard of here.  I was touched and heartened by such neighborliness brought on by a hole in the ground.

Six months later.

You can’t always anticipate how the cues in your life will lead you down this road or that, because often you don’t have control, or you abdicate control, or you look around at your life and wonder how you lost control, and when you arrive at the end of a road you didn’t plot, you wonder, how did I get here?  This was not on my map and I don’t know if I can ever get back again to where I am meant to be.  Rubble had occluded the sunlight and I was without my compass of sunlight and time.

But that is the way of most of us and my garden is only a metaphor.  I had lost a sense of growth and seasons and the unnerving shake of that put me off the rhythm of my life.  There are other phosphorous bursts in this scenario, but they belong to other stories.   I had lost a desperate muse, and found no way of getting him back.

In effect, the work you put into a garden is your hope of future flowering.  In the destruction you think is your life, you plant seeds, nurture them, watch them grow, and somehow, some way, you learn to make the hard choices to bring it back to life. 

And sometimes to bring yourself back to life.  There are, sometimes, roses in the wreckage.

One of my overwhelming impressions of Paris when I went there for the first time as a young man was that, not only would I never go there with my sister again, but that it was difficult to see the sights when you were constantly looking down.  The Parisians, then as now, were very nonchalant about the manner in which they allowed doggy detritus to foul the otherwise elegant trottoirs du Boulevard des Champs Elysées.  It was more like the Champs du Mars for the minefield of muck one had to negotiate.  Playing hopscotch with the butt-bombs, I was appalled that the French could allow this in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.  It was as if Leonardo painted a pimple on the Mona Lisa.

A week of professional training brought me to Brussels many years later, and it seemed as if it was déjà-poo all over again.  It even inspired a song:

“Doo-wop, doo-wop, step, step pretty, you’re spending a week in dog-poo city”

Or words to that effect.  I remember wondering if this was a Francophile thing, or a European thing, (Swiss dogs, by law, do not poo), but more than that, why no one seemed to mind any more than they minded flicking a cigarette end in the gutter?   It was amazing to watch the well-heeled and the down-at-heel alike deftly side-stepping these canine calling cards as easily as a loose cobblestone with only the faintest of a Gallic turning of the nose.   I had forgotten that I once had Paris and was not so fortunate.  

Years later I was to return to Paris with my fiancée, not my sister, and was able to walk the Champs Elysées while reading the paper except to be almost run over by a limousine carrying the Queen of England.  The streets had been cleared of muck-mines and on my return to Brussels several years later, things had quite improved.  Signs forbidding the pooing of dogs were ubiquitous, and in the parks there were even bins dedicated to this purpose, provided it was well wrapped in a doggy-doo-bag.   

One of the by-products of acquiring a dog is an education in waste management.  Monty trained up pretty well, and today will now happily be closed up in the kitchen all day, not touching food and drink like an aesthete, and boiling it all day until I come home to let him out to do his bidness in the garden.  Sometimes I’ll then chuck it over the fence into the goat paddock on the premise that goats have no self-esteem and don’t give a, well, you know.  But Monty is a creature of habit and when we go walkies to get the paper on Sunday mornings, he always pauses in front of one particular house and makes a deposit.  One such morning, I had no doggie bags with me and walking a few metres further on, I turned to be greeted by a torrent of Flemish abuse by the owner of the house whose pavement Monty had blessed.  I explained that I was on my way to get more doggy bags (an expedient, if useful lie) and would return presently to relieve his sidewalk of said befoulment. 

Feeling impressed with the forceful change in attitude, though of course somewhat shamed, I returned a few minutes later to the front of his house and made a dramatic turn in front of his windows of scooping the product in a perfumed poo-sack, and, tying it to the dog lead in the chic fashion of country dog-owners, proceeded home, feeling finally welcome in the new Belgium.      

I had been sawing back and forth between my landlord and his agent over an overgrown leylandii hedge at the bottom of the garden.  As is common with such hedges, it had been let go over thirty years and now was tall enough to block out most of the morning sun in the garden.  My landlord, a perfectly nice but rather, ahem, frugal gentleman, had brought in a professional earlier in the spring who recommended that the whole thing be taken out.  This I most certainly did not want as it was a nesting site for pigeons and mourning doves, and blocked the view of an agricultural warehouse on the other side of the goat paddock.  As is the law here, I would have been perfectly within my rights to call the commune and have them trim the hedge and bill the landlord.  But that was not a solution.   I just wanted a short, back and sides, not a shave or ill will.  So I arranged with the agent that we would address the issue in the autumn after the nesting season and I would pony out for a trim. 

This is the hedge that is the perennial problem between neighbours.  It is often a border feature and because it grows quickly; it is a good privacy hedge.  But it has to be pruned masterfully else it grows out of control and you get the neighbours coming through anyway to rail against your sunblock.  But the problem with leylandii is you just don’t cut them back.  They won’t put out interior shoots, so if you prune them back roughly, all you get is dead wood.  They only grow from the outside out.

So you can imagine my surprise to find my landlord and his wife, an elderly couple of at least 70, out all weekend attacking this 20 metre hedge.  He was shinnying up a ladder with an electric chainsaw, and she was at the end of a rope hauling off branches the size of a baby redwood.  Hercules and Amazon in their dotage were fast tackling this wall of insurmountable hardwood between me and their goats.  Gobsmackedly guilt-making.  I was working inside most of that day but would occasionally feel shitty enough to venture out and help shift branches and proffer cups of tea.  They would hack, saw and drag branches over to their van, load up, make a run to the dump, then come back and start over.  At one point I did make the offer to split the cost of a professional tree service with them, which they graciously refused on the grounds that the job was already half done, which it was.  I tucked my tail between my legs and retreated indoors while Monty the Dog was having a whale of a time wagging his at all the excitement and attention.

By day’s end, a full two-thirds of the hedge was gone and even with the waning sun there was so much more light in the garden and, indeed the house.  The sky was open and huge, like the big skies I had loved in Africa and the Malvern Hills.  And yet....

The hedge was now straggled and ragged, stumps of the trees peeking over the foliage like bad dentistry.  And as welcome as the open light was, it left a queasy feeling of exposure and vulnerability, as if I was now out in the garden in only my socks and foundation garments.  A garden that had once seemed so cosy and inviting now was far too big and less intimate.

But this I could live with if it meant the daffodils bloomed in March rather than May.  Ivy would soon cover the ragged stumps, and once I had filled and re-hung the bird feeder, the birds flocked back as if nothing had changed.  Come spring I am sure I will get used to the big sky and wonder how I ever did without.

This crept up on me on the radio as I was doing the washing up, dealing with the mundane of housekeeping.  I stopped scrubbing a pot and went into the living room and jacked up the volume and returned to a time, as songs take you, that remind you of where you came from and had no idea where you were going to.

This resonated with me at a time when I was forced from a home I loved and set off on travels that were necessitated by circumstances I didn’t know then how to control.  It was an era when I thought I had no will and had to go where the winds of circumstance blew me.

I played this over and over again in my bedroom that year, on the 45 rpm version I had then, and after I had left England and moved on to East Africa, my mother once wrote to me there, saying how she had heard this song on the radio and understood the longing I had to stay home that was denied me and that she felt the pain and responsibility for the loss of me to other lands.  In the callowness of youth, I didn’t understand her guilt, though I do now.  She felt responsible for her son’s diaspora.

That was how that song resonated for me then, but that is not why it drove me out of the kitchen, to turn up the volume.  It was because it sang to me of something new, my love.

It started of our beginnings, of you being lost, and searching.  Of my being lost and searching, and us finding one another.  Of questions that perhaps can never be answered, or maybe don’t matter.  Of sunrises and hope, of you speaking an ancient language to me, of hope and finding strength, and the promises you made, when you are a man who doesn’t make promises.

But mostly, my love, I chose this because it’s a show of the Northern Lights, an ambition for you.

I’d give that to you. I promise.

Just hold my hand and we’re there.

Somehow we’ll find our way home.

Corny, I know, but fuck it, we’re in love.

It was dark when I left the house this morning, and it will be dark every morning now, for at least the next six months.  The sun, when it rises, will still shine on a world of green, but now brown and curling at the edges.  It will warm the day and burn off the morning mist, but I notice the dew is a bit heavier on the windscreen these days and there is no longer a gloaming through the window shade as I go to sleep.  The day is not far off when I will awake to see my morning breath.

Like the year, the garden is tired and fading at the edges.  A successful blooming season has left the petunias straggly and drawn.  The lupines have become infested with aphids and are bowing towards the ground for their winter sleep. Too late, perhaps, I sprayed them with a water and dishwashing liquid solution; I’ve heard this is an eco-friendly approach to aphid control, but I’m not hoping for much more than clean aphids with a sheen.  After the May bloom, the roses were given a mild pruning and have put forth new shoots and the beginning of buds.  If the autumn is a mild one, they may flower again.  October roses are like an echo for a spring long past, a trigger of memory.  “Ah, yes,” they seem to say, “I remember when the world was young and I was beautiful.”  The roses of autumn are smaller, though no less sweet for the brown leaves and faded petals, like a parchment old-lady kiss redolent of lace and lavender water.

The passion flower vine is lush and ambitious, serpentine tendrils with their coiled fingers ready to grasp any support at hand.  It is pregnant with buds, though I am not sure when it is meant to flower, as this is the first I have grown.  It was given to me by a cousin from the Brazilian side of the family and is welcome in my garden of family heirlooms.  References tell me the passion flower is not native to Europe, and this may be true, but this is a legacy plant and thus is at home in my garden.

Apart from the roses, I am letting the rest of the flowers go to seed, the hope of their return next year.  Already marigolds, cosmos, and portulaca have re-seeded and are thriving, the children of last year’s planting.  As for the others, they will be left to find their own way to a winter’s rest, tired and drawn.  The first leaves of autumn are already beginning to gather where the winds eddy as if waving farewell and good morrow.

In the hour after they left, I stood in the kitchen amidst the detritus of our last family meal, and made noises no human should ever have to make, or even hear.

Someone long ago said to me, ‘What do you want?  Look around at what you’ve got; that’s what you wanted.’  I don’t remember ever wanting this, though I knew when I started down this road that this would come, one of the unintended results of expectation, the road-kill of the course we set for ourselves.

The boys spent their last four days in Belgium with me.  We had pillow fights, I cooked their favourite meals, we went to the movies, cuddled in bed watching television, and I overlooked the endless bickering that adolescent brothers engage in, knowing as I hated it that I would come to miss it.  I woke Alex up by putting a doggy biscuit next to his ear and having Monty jump all over him.  I left Miles for hours at computer games, because I know that’s how he copes.  We didn’t talk about the inevitable; the parting of our ways, because they don’t, because they’re young teens, because they lack for the words, or I don’t know and it doesn’t matter anyway, it was about a happy four days together, not the end of a time and a life.

They were more affectionate and clingy than normal, and we are a huggy family.  The hugs lasted longer, an accompaniment to the comfortable rhythm of competitive patter:

I’ll miss you

I’ll miss you more

I don’t think so

U-huh

Not possible

Possible!

No way!

Way!

Dude!

How did it get to this?  How could I do this to them in a time when the rumblings of adolescence will shake the ground under the feet and the solidity they had counted on has turned to sand?  I was supposed to protect them, keep them from harm. 

There are threads in every story and how we weave them into life is largely up to us.  I could follow the thread back through the maze that led us to this, but that would be as if untangling a knot of vipers.  It is what it is.  I could follow that thread back to hundreds of voices and millions of words but in the end, I am responsible for the love these two young men have for me.  I got here myself.

The last night before they all flew off to the States, they came to my house for dinner, theirs having been packed and emptied of the last compass points of our life as a family.  I grilled some chops, steamed broccoli and made savoury rice from a box. We sat at the dining table that I grew up with, its witness to three generations of a family in love and turmoil.  There were two red roses cut from the garden in a bud vase in the centre of the table.  I told them of a tradition my mother and I had when I was travelling so much and away for years at a stretch: that you would be given a red rose at the start of your journey, and another on your return.  The roses had always to be in pairs to ensure your return.  But they left without the roses and they withered and died.  I have saved a petal from each, wrapped in tissue paper, in a dictionary.

When my father died, a friend who didn’t know him told me to not fight grief; to let it come, it will manifest itself in ways you do not expect and practices stealth to extract its due.  No matter how you anticipate and plan and tell yourself it’s healthy, when it comes, it bites you in the arse.  When they walked out the door that night and I walked into the kitchen to the last of our meal as a family, I was caught by something visceral.  It came from wells within I didn’t know existed and vomited a noise I didn’t know.   It wasn’t a scream, so much as the moan of the damned.  I let it out for the years of the lies and the loss that resulted from them, from the deceit and the damage, the pain I had caused my loved ones and the blame I could not inflict on the dead.  It was late at night, and may have disturbed my upstairs neighbours, but I was beyond that and they never said anything.  They are, in any case, kind people.  The Flemish have a stoicism I lack.

That was a month ago now and though there is still the grief, I realise I am exactly where I should be and have learned to cope with a life that continues in spite of what I feel and what I need.  There are bills to pay and laundry to do and a job to be getting on with.  I am in regular e-mail touch with my boys in their travels and soon there will be webcams and instant messaging, and I am grateful for that.

There is healing only so much as one accepts that life will always find a way.  They are young and their lives will.  My say in that is lessened by geography and the circumstances their mother and I helped to engineer.  But they are with her and she is a good mother.  And I think they will be fine.

As for me, the screams are gone and I start to build a life I have no experience for.  But that’s okay, I’m good at troubleshooting and I still find myself expecting more from life than I have reason to hope for.  This and other disappointments are only other challenges.  I have to learn how to father from a remove, but that can be nowhere near as difficult as learning how to be a father in the first place.  I’ll do that, because I brought myself here.

I grew up a stranger in a stranger’s land.  It was the America of the 60’s and 70’s and it was Texas, and I started life there with so many strikes against me.

I couldn’t speak English until I was five or so, I can’t remember, but I was always conscious that my parents were from someplace other and starting off in a vernacular that is not only foreign to one’s environment, but also inimacable to it, defined the rest of my life.  To this day, I still speak a language no one quite understands.

The short story, then the long one.

My parents were from Brazil.  In Texas this made no difference back then, I was a wetback and that was it.  That my family was educated, cosmopolitan and accomplished counted for little.  That they worked hard to send me to the best schools made no difference.  I was tainted.

But I never minded that really.  I was seen as different and that was what I instinctively knew I was anyway, and it didn’t matter what my schoolmates thought, I reveled in the difference and promoted it.  I am not of you, I said, didn’t say to them, I am something other, something you cannot, or will not understand.  I am Camus’ Stranger and his Plague, because you fear me on so many levels, and you probably haven’t read Camus anyway and so have no idea what I’m talking about.  I was such an insufferable treat back then.

But as I was something other then, there was something more.  The clues to my something other were there from an early age, something I didn’t understand, but that melded into the vernacular of being outside.  I never fit into anyone’s idiom, and this was only an extension of that.  I have written before of my awareness that I was attracted to men from an early age, but this was something that, as I grew with time and a Catholic education, and that in Texas, I learned to hide as something far more sinister than being the child of wetbacks, however ignorantly misconceived.  Being someone other from the beginning only gave me more tools to hide.  But one’s sexuality is a viscerally difficult thing to hide, more so than an accent or a birth certificate.  By my adolescence, I had left the ethnicity behind and found myself vilified for something other.

None of this matters now, except that I found myself at lunch today with a colleague who is Canadian.  He’s a great pal and was instrumental in helping me find the job that may keep me in Brussels.  He’s also a great fan of my gardening columns and we share a passion for gardening and a love for the Northwest of England.  I enjoy this man.  We often talk politics and society, Ralph and I, and his Canadian perspective is valuable.  He gives me the view of a Canadian on America, which is basically, chill, guys, what is the big hairy deal?  He knows I’m gay, and that is as much an issue as his voting rights being married to an American.  Er, not related.  When Canada integrated gays into the military, the initial reaction was the breakdown off military discipline until someone said, what is the big hairy deal?  When Canada allowed gay marriages, the initial reaction was the breakdown of society until someone said, what is the big hairy deal?  And Canada just got on with it. 

But as we were having lunch today, and talking about all this, there was a chap queuing up to pay for his tray and I said to Ralph that I thought this guy was a bit of all-right, he was good looking and had a great arse.  Ralph got a bit squeamish at this and then I said:

“Look, mate.  All those years of growing up with locker room conversations where I had nothing to add, because they were talking about things that I had nothing to say, and now…”

“And now you’re making up for lost time, Brian.”, he said, laughing.

“Yes!!”, I said, and I knew he understood. 

I know what it is to grow up in a society where your vernacular has no translator.  I know what it is to live in a world that has no cues for who you are, where they mitigate against who you are, and to strive for an identity in a world that denies you a tick in a box its imagination has no room for.  I understand this on so many levels that few are favoured with access to.

I remember a few years ago writing a response on someone else’s blog about a question someone had asked them about their HIV status, on the assumption that they were gay and so must be HIV+.  I can’t find that posting now, but what I think I said then went something like this:

I am a man, and a father of two wonderful boys, and a gifted writer; I am an excellent cook, a good gardener, a loved son and a good brother.  I am gay and I am a polyglot, and addicted to cryptic crosswords.  I have been a talented actor and a successful theatre director.  I have been a great teacher, and a poor one.  I can’t read maps, I am inherently lazy and so have an instinct of how to make things run efficiently.  I pick at my toenails when reading a good book, and am in unending search of the perfect fried chicken recipe.  My roots are in Brazil and Maine, Switzerland and Hamburg, Dallas and Baltimore, London and Brussels, and I left part of my heart in East Africa.  All these and none of these define who I am.

So I will make up for the lost time in ogling that security guard, or checking out the guy in the line at the cafeteria, and I am grateful to Ralph that, even though it made him uncomfortable, he understood what it is to look in through another window. 

Cheers, Ralph.   

My father had only a small terrace garden in his two-up, two-down, but it was bright and sunny and he had managed a small garden with everything in pots, including those of my mother’s roses he was able to bring with him when he sold the house.  These had lived in pots for many years including one, I think that had been on her grave, but I no longer remember.  I brought his roses home with me last summer, intending to put them in the ground but time and emotional inertia left them to winter over on my terrace, cold and root bound.

But with last Sunday’s warmth and sunshine it was time to clean up the garden for spring and with the help of my boys and a basic lesson in geometry, I dug a diamond-shaped rose bed in the middle of the lawn.  Diamond is perhaps too elegant a word for as my astute twelve-year old pointed out, it was more of a rhombus, but that was fine; I have always been diametrically opposed to symmetry. 

My garden flat is the downstairs of what had once been a farmhouse, and the soil of the garden, though underlain with the local clay, is rich and dark and easily workable.  It is riddled with large healthy worms and the things I plant seem pleased to be there and flourish.  Nevertheless, I dug a large quantity of compost and manure (fumier séché de vache) into the soil and added rose food to the soil packed around the roses.  As they had been pot-bound for so long, they had been deprived of nutrients and so were spindly, with rickety branches and little leaf growth.  As with people, fresh starts and transplanted environments are tricky times, and care and encouragement is needed to put down roots in a new home.  Care should be taken in keeping the root ball intact and leaving some of the original soil attached to the roots so that it feels a little at home in a new neighbourhood. 

Mine is not a broad sweep of lawn and it ends in an overgrown leylandii hedge that blocks much of the sun, but the new bed seems to have enlarged the garden, giving it depth and perspective and when the roses bloom this summer, I hope that it serves to extend the view, a trompe l’oeil of hope winking at limitation.  Small spaces are only as girded as imagination allows, and my little rose bed serves to broaden the view from my window.

But more so, I was pleased that my sons had helped to dig a new home for their grandparents’ roses, and as long as the roses live, my boys will have a stake in the soil and in the family.  Alongside these heirlooms, I planted my own Blue Moon rose, a favourite of my mother, and a blowsy, show-off rose called “Samba”, a nod to my parents’ childhood. 

It is easy to feel smug and self-gratified in a garden and it is healthy to realize that the natural world will cock you a snook at the first opportunity.  The next morning I woke to find that the neighbours’ cat had dug a hole in the soil and used my rose bed as a latrine.  Mother would have laughed, and been pleased.

It begins before spring, when farmers’ fields stir from their fallow sleep.  You don’t notice it in the cold, but only when the days begin to warm, and windows are tentatively left open to the promise of balmier days.  It wafts in and spreads, sweetening the air and singing of renewal and fertility.  The beasts that inhabit the invisible world of the soil welcome its arrival.  It awakens them, nurtures them, and they rise to meet the imperative of spreading its richness.

From the dales of Yorkshire, to Somerset and Kent, from the Pas de Calais through Flanders, the Rhineland, and the steppes of the Volga, it covers a continent and perfumes the air and farms and gardens everywhere welcome it as the kiss of botanical life.

Manure.

I have always slept with the window open and I can remember as a young man the first morning when the sweet pungency of manure crept in through my morning dreams, and I would awaken with the hope of longer, warmer days to come and the prospect of the world coming back to life after the death of winter.  Manure is the smell of hope and of life renewing itself.  It brings thoughts of rosebuds in May and the lazy hum of insects in my mother’s fruit trees, pregnant with blossom.  It foretells of long bicycle rides in the lanes through the farms with the spikes of summer wheat waltzing in a June breeze.  It prepares the garden canvas for the colours of cosmos and marigold and brings visions of snapdragons and the firebrands of lupine dancing into my head.  It presages the taste of sweet corn in September and summer squash and apples and pears.  It is the first taste of the juicy explosion of a vine-ripened tomato and the robustness of the first pumpkin of October.

My neighbour and I often walk our dogs together in the lanes and byways bordering the local farms.  This last Saturday, she was bemoaning the smell of manure, and wrinkling her nose.  Her husband had commented wisely that this was a part of country life, and unbeknownst to her, the dogs were friskier, there was a spring in her step, and she was full of her plans for an unknown future.  This is what manure does; it creates a future.

Indeed, as you drive the country lanes and roll down the windows the fragrance comes into the car like sunshine and if you had a soft top, you’d roll it down, put on your shades, and let the car go where it will, as long as you could take in the heady scent of country air and let it permeate your body and soul, the smell of the fecundity of the earth that drives one to thoughts of love.

Ah, manure, the stuff of life itself!

She said we had met before, though I don’t remember.  She was soon to leave town so I thought nothing of it until she mentioned that she was a regular reader of these pages and, as did I, held an abiding love for her garden.  “I couldn’t do anything with the house, you see”, she said, “it wasn’t mine to do so that left me with the garden.”  Her stories of recovery, of cutting back years of neglect and others’ more quirky notions of what a garden should be, had consumed her time here.  It was almost as if Clarence the angel had been told he had three years to leave something of beauty on earth in order to win his wings.

I revel in such stories, of gardens recovered from history.  Any gardener worth their salt knows that when you plan a garden, you plan for the ages and on the understanding that a garden can’t, won’t, be yours forever.  You have its stewardship but you pass it on and the pain involved, the sweat and bloodied scrapes, the horny calluses and stiff backs are nothing to the pain of loving it and letting go.  But she understood that what you leave behind tells of your love when it was yours.  She knew this because of a single tree.

It was tall and majestic, a weeping beech planted before the house was built over seventy years ago.  By where it was planted and the space allowed it, the hands on that last shovel of earth all those years ago could see down the years to a middle-aged woman who stood behind the curtains of its branches and where “you feel like a five-year-old again, in a magical tree house and when the sun dapples through the branches it’s as if fairies have come to play in the tree top.”  The light that shone through her eyes and dappled her face when she spoke of this tree was enchanting.  This was irresistible.

I was late because I was lost, I had never been to this part of town.  It was threatening rain and I knew she had little time left and much to do.  We took a tour of the garden as she described what was there for her when she arrived, and how she had recovered it to leave behind.  The shrubs and trees she had revived, the difficult decisions of what to leave and what had to be cut back or uprooted, all these taken with a vision of the past, and laying out the foundation of the future.

“But this is it!”, she said, her eyes dancing with that excitement reserved for children, “this is the tree I was telling you about!  I defy anyone not to feel like a child in here,” as she took me inside a waterfall of deep Amazonian green.

Some moments are magical not because of the time, or the place but because the magic is conveyed as the gift itself, and thus is made one’s own.  This tree was, for me, a cathedral, its uttermost branches like vaulted arches, flying up to meet green walls that cascaded to the ground, a cool and green sanctuary allowing light to dance in and play along the trunk and the walls.  I almost fancied angels leaping and laughing from branch to trunk, pausing to sing in a high perch as the pale light danced under the roof of this sacred place.  Not a word passed for a moment that seemed an age in this sweet chorus of light and leaf.  I could have stayed here, safe and blessed, forever.

It was late.  She had so much to do before flying home in the morning.  “As a leaving gift, my gardener made a plan for my garden back in Maryland,” she said, touched by the gesture, but I wasn’t surprised.  This was her reward for stewardship, the creation of something new she could call her own.  To pass down the years for others to cherish and discover.   As she allowed me to discover. 

Thank you, Maris, for the gift of your tree. 

They returned to a house four feet under water. I cam home to normality and all its challenges. But there is a clifftop aways west of here with my footprints on it. Where the wind blows off the Atlantic, and the sun is always shining, and where the sea breaks against the rocks and I found peace. 

A quiet Sunday afternoon, the air still, warm and with the fetidness that comes from breathing inside a paper bag.  I’ve been here before, standing in other windows, in other places and times, hoping for the rains that never came or would come too little and too late, the ground so hard and dry and yearning that they would be of no use, just wasted tears.  In the goat paddock the dust rose indolently like a dying hand on a battlefield begging for water, and the goats stank in their clouds of flies.

With waterholes and ponds receding, I had set up a birdbath in the garden, hoping to attract with fresh water for the fowl.  It is a jerry-built contraption; a thin iron spike meant to hold a large bowl candle, in the cradle of which I set an ugly gray plastic bowl.  Simple, unobtrusive and best, cheap.   It was not of the ornate rococo gaudiness that passes for birdbaths in the local garden shops; no cherubs, saints or baroque flourishes.  This was a bird bar, not a baptism.

And after a few days they came.  First the little finches and sparrows.  They’d alight on the garden fence, wary and nervous in their jerky movements, heads flitting, beaks chattering.  Then with a jump, they’d land on the rim of the bowl, take one last look round to see the coast was clear, and dip their heads in for gulp.  Quickly they’d have another recce, one last sip, then would bolt off into the safety of the trees.  I would stay stock still at the table outside, my pen poised like a viper over 21 down of the crossword.  I had built this garden as a haven, not a fortress, and didn’t want the shier, prettier birds to be frightened away.

The pigeons were another matter.  There is a family nesting in the tall hedge above the goat paddock, their mournful keening a glad and familiar sound to anyone living in the country.  They would not approach from the fence, because this would make it wobble and cause them to lose their footing.  With a flapping of wings not unlike an attack helicopter, the pigeons would survey the garden from the rooftop then, like an enormous sumo wrestler bearing down on the neighborhood bathhouse, swoop down and land backwards on the edge of the bowl.  You’re unlikely ever to see a pigeon receive a Nobel Prize at the hands of His Majesty the King, and this is ably demonstrated by watching this dumb, cumbersome creature turn itself around on the thin edge of the bowl.  He’d have a drink, then another, then push off like a jumbo jet, causing the bowl to rock on its stand and half the water slop out.  Pigeons are proof positive that pigs can fly.

I’ll refill the bowl and retreat to my terrace and the crossword, watching the blackbird eye up his chance at the bar.  He’ll cock his head in my direction, and I can almost hear him sing:

“So make it one for my baby, and one more for the road.”

After a month of upheaval, worry, sleepless nights, strange hours and mortal uncertainty, I’ve been left with somewhat less than a Fuzzy Lumpkins approach to the bells, be they my alarm clock at 5.30 every morning, or worse, the phone ringing. It’s said that disaster comes looking for you, just sit tight and wait for it. Disaster may knock at my door at any time, so I’ll exercise the corollary to that whereby if you look for it, every cloud has a silver lining. Herewith a few silver linings.

M