Green red
garden sky
words floating
through my mind
Early evening and I'm sitting in the garden. Although technically this is my garden, legally I own it, I had it designed and created, I have claimed it both alone and with friends, in daylight and in the dark, but still it doesn't feel like it belongs to me…or I to it.
It still holds the mark of the designer who created it for me. In a sense part of it always will; I know he left a piece of his soul here. But there is a rule. Rule Number 12: when the job is done, walk away. I tried to explain that I would love it, but it had to be allowed to grow as it would and he had to trust me to love it.
Meanwhile the wayward weather of our climate-change summers, harsh heat and downpours, has encouraged the space to grow away from us both. The weeds are thriving. The grass needs cutting – or does it?
For reasons I don't understand I find myself resisting taking hold until I can get up in the morning and walk straight out into it, until when I leave in the evening or at midnight it will be to be direct away to my bed, until I can potter for a few minutes or spend a whole day as the mood takes me, until…until next week when (all being well) I will finally be living here.
I have spent over a year to-ing and fro-ing from this garden and from the house it belongs to. For about half of that time I've been having the work done, designing the environment in which I will begin again. The property has been empty, but not unloved. In a few days it will be a home again. My home.
In the meantime, the plants are thriving or dying back, one or the other depending on who knows what – not me, not yet, I haven't been a gardener before – the which are doing what is not necessarily as I would have chosen. But for a few more days, it won't matter. This space survived nigh on twenty years of neglect. It has been rescued since then. Re-tamed. Of course it will reassert itself at any opportunity. I can live with that. Enough is in place, that will hold, and the rest of it and I will get to know each other, slowly. Starting in a few days' time.
For now I sit as the shadows lengthen and the doves pace the ridge of next door's roof wondering what on earth is going on and the drying leaves of the banana palms rustle in the evening breeze. It doesn't quite feel like mine just yet…but it will, and soon.
