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.