In the late afternoon she escapes the stuffy heat of the house to the garden, desperate for relief in the fresh air and dome of blue that extends all around her. Cockies screech and parrots startle - both plum thieves, after the warm fruit that dangle like gonads from the tree. One of the chickens is making a fuss from it's jail where she's attempting to break it from it's broodiness, a hen hot with hormones and desperate for chicks.
It's the first breath she's properly taken all day. Since rising she's been hot and prickling with anxiety, a not so subtle fizzing and boiling beneath the skin, a dance of tension and anticipation that plays off the sweltering atmosphere. She knows she should breath, but it's not til the late afternoon that she's consciously thought of it. Everything is worry - her painfully thin father with his wasting muscles, the worry she'll be trapped in the UK like she was in the pandemic, the dwindling bank balance, the need to have time alone and instead, the constant demands. She wants to scream, but she needs to be an adult.
Calendula break seed in the drying soil, curled and shrivelled things that give forth many yellow and orange suns. She remembers coming home after two weeks trapped in the quarantine hotel and seeing their brightness and crying with happy and bewildered shock. The way the light hit them was pure joy. A sunflower nods at her. This is how it is, it says. We grow and die, grow and die, grow and die. You too do this. It will pass. It will pass. It will pass. From the wilting comes something else entirely.
Sometimes she waters not so much for the soil but to watch the droplets catch the light, the rain twinkling down between bursts of elderberries to cool the air below. She lets it fall on her toes and longs for a body of water to dissolve in. She fills the bird baths because she knows later the magpies will come down for thier noisy bath, and Mr Bojangles, the bronzewing, with his iridescent plumage, come strutting across the garden and delicately jump to the water's edge. Each bird has their own pattern.
She pinches blue borage flowers from the plentiful plants that grow wild across the garden, folding at the hip so that the anxiety rushes down her spine and out her head and into the soil. It'll take it - the slaters will break it down, the worms, the bacteria she's been nurturing with compost. It'll turn it into something new, just as the flowers turn into jewels in iceblocks. There's still some in the freezer from last week - perhaps it's time to sip cold water and breathe at last.
This piece is in response to the Hive Garden's new #creativegarden challenge that comes out every Sunday. There's two prompts every week - one long, one short. I decided to write for the short one, 'temperature'. It's clearly about me - I'm writing in the third person to emotionally distance myself from the anxiety I'm feeling right now about going away!
With Love,
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How beautiful, the metaphors. I feel so grounded, and perhaps reminded of how important it is to be reminded of what's to come and that is that most of it will pass, just like myself. So better make most of it, come rain or shine.
It's a constant lesson isn't it? We know this in our hearts but some days it feels all consuming. To me its almost a mantra: it'll pass, it'll pass!!!
Sun flowers always bring happiness and brightness in life, even i too have sunflower in my garden, whicg attracted me alot...
Everyone loves sunflowers 🌻
Very interesting write up I love it