The garden is in one of its sporadic moments of late spring perfection. Weeds are poking up their heads teasing me into action but I pretend I can’t see them, besides they’ll wait until I’m looking in a different direction or have wandered off for a cup of tea to make their dash to the top of the flower jungle. When I was younger; much younger, a girl really; I never imagined the consistency of weeding involved in a garden. I also never imagined I would be able to count my age in lots of twenty and almost use up all the fingers on one hand. Now I can do that, and the weeds can become part of the rambling wildness of the flowerbed. If they make it by the time I’m back from my cup of tea.
I wasn’t always this way, in those years about three fingers worth ago, I would have been on my knees at the edge, where grass crosses into soil and there I’d have waited to pounce. Fighting a desperate war with garden interlopers, begging them to try harder so my savagery had a focus to its expulsion. Savagery towards weeds, one of the ways I survived the bad parts. It helped, or distracted me until the abyss dulled. Pity the arthritis spitting venom into my joints as a reminder of encroaching death won’t be mended the same way.
Forget-me-nots, pinks, orange blossoms, cherry blossoms dropping into bulging fruits dangling like my ex-husbands testicles had begun to in his older years, honeysuckle filled with the bees from my own hives. They stuff the afternoon silence with the roar of a television out of tune and never switched off. Every now and then I catch a word or two said by voices from my past hidden in the drone. What if the owners of those voices are still living. I am. Should I assume that they have long since died just because they no longer have any part to play in my life? Maybe that is what aging really is, there is only so much of each person and when you share part of yourself with another then lose them in the ebb and flow of living, they take the part of you they knew with them. Maybe a year or two, maybe only a month, maybe ten years, but when they die so do those years of yours. Does that mean if you never have a friend you'd never age? Or maybe if you never leave they never would. Existential crap, but it would explain how people seem to age in great jumps rather than smooth and steady.
Edith yelps and I watch her fluffy red-brown form race out from where she was stealing the dropped cherries and come barreling towards me until she is safe behind my skin-saggy legs, whimpering. I pull her around and pat my lap. With her front paws resting on my thighs I take a look to see that she hasn’t been stung on her tongue. Her left jowl is puffing up and I pull out the sting. This has happened so regularly in the past weeks I’m not particularly concerned, I’m sure she is developing some level of immunity to bee stings. Scratching her ears absently I’m carried back to another dog, another garden, the yelp of a child that time, innocent young legs hobbling towards me, a posy of flowers gradually growing smaller as they dropped from her chubby little fingers. From where I lounged in the striped hammock I had brought in Cambodia ten years before, I could see her cheeks glistening damp with tears. But she never made a sound when she cried, even after having her for four years this peculiarity had still made me uncomfortable, as if I'd had a presentiment that it would be the death of her. When she reached me I’d pushed Boots – the dog - off my lap to make room. She leaned over her own foot as I readied myself to pull out the sting, bright fluffy hair curtaining down so I had to lift it to operate. Before I could her squat, childhood fingers - stained with grass and sticky white sap from the petunias she must have been plucking before disaster struck - wrapped themselves around three of mine and we had both spent a moment marveling at the entire bee still dangling from the sting that had been both its protector and its instrument of suicide. Gently this little girl of mine used her own fingers to pull out the animal. Sting forgotten she slid back to the grass and mournfully limped to the area of the garden reserved as the graveyard; mice trapped in the kitchen, birds who had struck the windows before we started hanging ribbons down the glass, a vole a passing car had squashed one day the year before, and now, a bee. After dinner, which my blonde cherub refused to eat, the two of us had looked to the encyclopedia, with its green leather and gold embossed letter B of authority, for information about the life of bees and I had proven to my daughter that, as they only had a life span of a few weeks, she probably hadn’t been the cause of an early death. We’d had ice-cream to celebrate the bee’s life. The next day the village library lost every book it had on apiaries. A month later we were the proud owners of our first beehive. The ones buzzing around me now are decedents of those first bees. I’ve come close to losing the line but I fight for them; they're proof I’ve managed to perform my duties as carer successfully, at least once.
I feel a dampness on my cheeks. “It would appear Edith, at my age I have begun her habit of silence in sorrow.” Kissing Edith’s black nose I push the great lump of fur back to the ground, “Well I am in a melancholy mood today.” I stare into the flowerbed again, seeing nothing, not even sure I remember what it is the deep sections of my conscious are trying to pull up from hidden places. “A chocolate milkshake will do it,” I mutter, “With ice-cream and vanilla. Come-on fuzzy I’ll make one for you too.”
My sister taught me how to make milkshakes of a high calibre when I was about eight; she was fourteen. Who she'd learned the addition of vanilla essence from I don’t know and never thought to ask. Why is it those unimportant pieces of trivia have become the only things I care about after all those years I spent filling my mind with such impressive knowledge of cultures, languages, history, politics and art? We do indeed become children again in our aging years, but it is not just the nappies and dribbling that are a returning issue, we start to value what it was we valued so many years ago. So, so many years ago when I could still share milkshakes with my mother’s other daughter.
I remember my mother but take after my father, maybe that’s why I try to remember her more because I only have to look at myself to see him. She wore hats at rakish angles, pencil skirts, short jackets in matching colours. She danced like a gypsy, wild and free. How is that possible in those skirts? Am I mixing my memories? Was it her in the clothes or her in the dances? I don’t like these bubbles of confusion in my memory but I suspect it is not so much to do with age as to do with the last time I saw her being four fingers worth of age ago, before Columbia and the hammock and the chubby cherub and a buried bee and a second, silently suffered bite. As a race humans aren’t elephants, we have trouble getting our facts right two days after an event let alone that many years.
I cajole myself into forgiveness over this confusion; even if none of the memories of my mother are true, who'll ever know? More immediately I can’t remember if I’ve added the vanilla or not. I drop in a bit more to be safe, my taste buds aren’t as sensitive as they used to be, all that sensitivity has migrated to my emotions. I even like broccoli now.
My husband would be amazed.
Ex?
My ex-husband?
Widow?
I don’t like 'Widow', makes me sound like a little spider slinking in soil holding a lot of power and poison. I’m not a big fan of little spiders that hold a lot of power and poison; and sadness.
I can't ever be a widow.
I've never been married, even to my husband.
The blender is louder than the bees, it grates at my eardrums so I switch it off before all the ice-cream is broken down properly. I like the floating island lumps of milky sweetness anyway. Ice-cream has always been my weakness. One of them. The one that’s lasted the longest. I inherited that from Father, not Mother, I’ve never had a chance with a pencil skirt. Edith seems pleased with her share and because today is a day of impropriety and I don’t feel like washing anything, I jam my straw deep into the blender and carry the jug back out to the garden with me. Before all these distractions I was attempting to sketch something to fill in later with the oils in the studio. Art, the career choice that is hardest in your youth and the least ageist in your ironically named golden years. No one ever asks or cares if the painting they are spending thousands on was created by someone with withering capacities, as long as it has the right signature. If in nothing else I’m happy I can hold a paintbrush steadily. I’d say it’s the small things, but I’m not convinced it's until the big things are all gone that the small things matter at all.
There were days I wasn’t steady of hand. Of all the things that break your heart, the loss of that thing you have always used to overcome the other breakages tears it up the most. Without knowledge of the future how could I have been sure my steady hand would come back? There was no way, and empty hope and platitudes embittered me against those that wished them. I sought that cliché of comfort; I could hardly hold the bottle and couldn’t hold the glass so I bought a straw, a glass one so it didn’t taint the flavour. My ridiculous belief that at that time I was still about quality over quantity, they could have fed me diesel and I wouldn’t have recognised a difference in the taste.
I’m looking at my sketchpad, the jug of milkshake chilling my inner thighs, pleasantly – regardless of what the young believe I’m still alive down there. “What is this nonsense Edith?” I ask the red tail visible near the fish pond. It’s not a pointless question, Edith does have a peculiar ability to pick the best. The paintings that earn the most are the ones I’ve let her sign with a nose print. When she was a pup she signed one with pee, I was furious and she was banned from the studio until some plonker bought it, pee and all. I wonder if it smells in the damp weather, if the new owners have worked out where the stench is coming from? It’s good for the buyer Edith isn’t a skunk. She can come to the studio any time she likes now. She’s never felt the need to pee on another; I haven’t sold for quite as much as that again so I hold out hope she’ll deign to relieve herself once more. She’s wandered back to me now, dripping water from her jowls, to hide in the shade under my candy-striped deck chair; the same colours as my old hammock. I hold the pad down to her just incase I’ve assessed the sketchs' promise incorrectly. Edith doesn’t even raise her head to sniff at it, I lean over and watch her scrunch her eyes up like she does when she’s pretending she’s sleeping. “Faker.” I have to roll myself awkwardly out of the deck chair now, trying not to spill the remainder of my milkshake jug over the ground. When will I remember my body is no longer taking up three fingers of my right hand and leaning down like I just did means all of me has to keep heading in the same direction. I’m on the grass now, nose to nose with Edith, her round bobble eyebrows flicker up and down so I know she knows I’m there but is refusing to see me. The grass seems a good place to be and I pick up the sketchpad and a pencil I see lying beside the front leg of the chair. I start with the eyebrow and disappear from regular time for a while. I’m never sure how long I go away for when things switch on like that, not until I try to get up. Then I can make a good guess from my inability to do anything but roll onto my back, drop the pad and pencil to the grass and wiggle my fingers and toes, scaring off the numbness of pins to reveal the stabbing of needles helping to liven me up.
I must have dozed because Edith’s face is very long and very close when I open my eyes. Her cold, wet nose is smearing a bit of chocolate onto my own protruding facial feature. She obviously gained the chocolate addition from licking up the spilled jug I can spot to my right. Her eyes gaze down at me and I wonder that she doesn’t go cross-eyed. I interlace my fingers behind her neck and she backs up like she’s been trained to help old ladies to their feet after they fall asleep in their back garden. Now I’m back to sitting she wags her entire back half in encouragement, nudging me and licking me until I have to standup or be drowned in doggy slobber. I’ll need a shower before dinner; is anyone coming tonight? I don’t even know what day it is so why do I think I’ll remember dinner guests. Finally on my feet I see my pad still on the grass and moan at the thought of bending to pick it up. Edith reads my mind, as she sometimes can, and pushes it around the grass until she can get her teeth under it. Does slobber work the same way as pee? Taking it from her and running my fingers across her silky red head we walk towards the house, I leave the jug abandoned to the ants and any other little creature that can get where Edith’s crafty tongue could not. I flip over the sketchpad, not bad. I rub the floppy ears feeling her weight lean into me gently. I don’t think I’ll put this one up for sale though. Some things just can’t be seen properly by a stranger.
END