Well, this evening I’ve reached the end of my first month in quarantine, 28 days, 4 weeks. It seems peaceful. I love my house a lot more than I did, which was a lot. Happy to have the two of us here and not to be alone, though we are both introverts and have to use the bath tub as our second office so we can spend some time apart and keep well. He wears headphones and sings and it makes me laugh for joy. I feel grounded and sane and interested in life. Have worked my way through a foot-high stack of Seventies romance novels and embarked on some real reading. I don’t know about you but I am trying to prepare for ten months of this so if it turns out to be less, that will come as a glorious surprise. And: we are making rocket fuel. Today my first rocket seeds sprouted in the windowsill and I would just love to have a garden.
I wonder when I’ll ever see the seaside, or my mother, who is eighty-two so that may be just never. Hope everyone is keeping well and if you would like to share your quarantine story, I will listen. Good night.
Tag: gardening
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late summerhaft
Across town today I had the impulse to come through an overgrown island of trees that surrounds a church, and went wheeling my bike along its narrow, littered path where, if I tuned out the traffic, I could feel as though I were walking through a tiny woods. Someone is living there and had stacked their possessions under a low, clotty pine and strung their meagre collection of spare garments on a bush to dry. There’s still sun. Stringy and mean but sun nevertheless. We have had perhaps fourteen inconsecutive days of heat and sunshine this summer and already in August it is growing autumnal. As I was pushing my bike a man appeared beside me carrying a green plastic watering can. Berliners are busy when the sun comes out with their wild, colourful, shared public gardens. I’ve seen a woman dunking her can into the canal on a long rope so that she could tend the sunflowers she or someone else had planted and marked off with red and white striped tape. “What,” he said, cheerfully, “a man’s bicycle for a lady? Come now.”
“It’s true,” I said: stimmt. And we both looked down at my voluminous skirts, two prints in varying shades of indigo laid one over the top of the other. I passed a tiny preschool or as they call them, children’s shop, with nine little bicycles locked together out front and two double-barrelled prams parked side by side. As I came round the corner I started to laugh. A teenage boy was standing outside his ground-floor window, holding the end of a huge scarlet canoe which his friend fed from inside. He looked at me and I could see in his eyes the enjoyment of his instant recollection of the picture they must have made. They started laughing, too. It’s not the weather which keeps me here.
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the dark lit me home
I rode home after writing in a large dim room in silence with four other people. The evening blue was ripening to black, like a terrible bruise. In the dark other, unlighted bicycles hurtled past, people were strolling. The cars make way for bicycles and the cyclists make way for pedestrians and dogs. It is warm still and all the bars spill into the street. At a local bar the owner has a shaggy Alsation who was lounging out front, his paws sprawling forward, his orange ball lying some distance away. People walked around him without question. His head was tilted and he gazed into the sky abstractedly, as if he was looking at the moon.
Today a boat went by under a bridge I was crossing on foot, just a little motor boat. Maybe the length of two bath tubs. Three people were sat in it, two wearing hats and two with dogs on their laps. They made a wide round and turned to the old rusted pontoon which may perhaps be where the bridge was once footed. The pontoon protrudes into the stream and is painted bright yellow, like an inflatable dinghy, for safety. The man with the doggie on his lap cut the engine and the three of them floated, inspecting the guerrilla garden of bright flowers someone has planted in the rusted out hollows.
To carry the soil there and fill the rusted holes with fertility, to scramble down the bank every couple of days to water the plants: this seemed to me a beautiful enterprise. I showed the photos I made to a friend who said, Yes: I heard the guy who made that garden painted the outer rims black, because it was lovelier. Then he was fined because it was unsafe; and now all the old metal is yellow again. After our conversation I came out again onto the tree-lined street and rode home, following the moon all the way, more white than yellow, and hiding ineffectually in a tangle of treetops, in obscuring golden street lights, and behind partial cloud.
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gardening clothes
We went out to a swanky bar without getting out of our gardening clothes. It was quiet til a busload of people staggered in in some serious clobber. One of them came up to us and said, “How cool is it possible for two people to look as they drink their beers?” She was drunk. She looked me up and down and then told my companion, “Only five people in the world can wear dungarees – and she’s one of them.” I said, “Did you all just get off a bus or something? Did the cinema empty? Where did you all come from?” She pointed with her handbag. “Her – and her – they’re twins – it’s their 33rd birthday, we’ve been drinking in the park.” “66!” I said, because I am mathematical like that.
Afterwards we watched them taking turns to take selfies of each other. Can you take a selfie of someone else, can you even take a selfie at all when you’re not actually in it? Turns out you can. You just point any device at a group of made-up people and then watch as they instantly assemble themselves into sunny, close-headed groups. Everyone has a smile they can keep for ten minutes at a time. All the girls have long, straight glossy hair. They fall into varying heights, so that every face is seen, and it doesn’t matter how long the papparassist has to fiddle with his device, they’ll wait unmoving. “Australian women,” said my companion, dourly. “Somehow they all look like Jennifer Aniston.”
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light and shade
Today was a sad and complicated day and I couldn’t get myself off the couch. Life seemed at once too little and too much and I lay coiled under a faded rug that I love, cat curled on top of me, reading one trashy novel after another. Just now with the afternoon sun streaming in I went out to admire the work my incorrigible companion has been making: he is determined to transform the weedy, shaded wasteland out back into a luscious lawn, “so,” he said, “in the summer you can lie down on the grass and read your book.” He went to the hardware store and bought boxes of light-and-shade lawn seed and some kind of strewable powdered fertiliser. He yanked out all the flowering weeds and raked up dried twigs thrown down from the large camphor laurel that spreads its branches over our tiny yard, into a furry, untidy pile in one corner. He made a proper compost pile. The old man who lives next door and spends his days sitting either end of a splendid gold-figured couch in a little garden shed with his best friend struggled over on his stick to see what went on. He is Italian and speaks so little English and in so husky and broken a tone it was almost impossible for us to understand each other. He said, “No rain.” The grass would not grow. “I know,” I said, rolling my eyes and pointing – “Optimist.” “No sun,” he said, indicating the tree with its complication of fine branches. “Yes,” I said. “Maybe we are lucky,” said the man scattering fertiliser. Our neighbour gazed across the yard. He pointed to the huge shaggy mango tree two doors down. “I plant that.” He was immaculately dressed, a feat which in an older person living alone fills my throat with painful tears. He told us his grandchildren used to play in this yard and that is why he’s put the plastic netting up, to protect the lady (Mrs Something, I couldn’t decipher her name) who sold this house to our landlord from having to rescue their balls all day long. He told me his wife died, five years ago, and when I said, “I’m so sorry,” his face was consumed with sadness fresh and undigested. Mrs Something has died too. Now he rents out the top floor of his house to the man who two days ago knocked on our door with five rooting sprigs of Roman basil tenderly wrapped in dampened “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!” paper towel and then kept moist with a layer of cling wrap. He had attached with string a little label written in cursive, “Roman Basil. Very good for eating.” This tenant has filled the Italian man’s concreted yard with pots of herbs and vegetables and sometimes glances out his top window to wave to us on our shaded verandah. It’s a long time since I’ve had such wonderful neighbours. The Italian man rested on his stick, watching. He explained, or I think he did, that he is waiting for his sister who calls every morning from Venice. Talking about the death of his wife and the death of Mrs Something from this house he patted his chest with a knotted hand. “I too, soon.” “Me too,” I said, “eventually. Happen to us all.” “No,” he said, shaking his head, smiling: “92! 92!” It astonishes me how some people can be so self-centred and cruel and others light their eyes on the world like birds resting on a beautiful branch: the fire in their belly is a generous flame, lighting everything around it with compassion and love; were it not for those people I would not know how to make a home of this strange and wonderful, terrible world.
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replanting
“Aw!” ‘What?’ “Aw just… somebody’s torn this little plant out, and now it’s gunna die.” I could hear my surprised, injured tone of voice, high like a disappointed child. My friend stopped and I had already squatted in front of the dismal garden bed built round the trunk of a tree, in which someone had planted four or five tiny evergreens and a wilting marigold. It was two degrees this morning; I had on leather gloves. Ideal for scraping out a hole in the soil. Took up the tiny shrub, lying on its side in what seemed to me a foetal position, and stowed it in it new hole, tucking soil around its roots and talking to it as I pressed the dirt into place. “There you go, that’s better…” I stood up, brushing my gloves against one another, and turned back to my friend and our conversation. A woman on a bicycle had stopped to watch. She gave me this head-tilting, compassionate look with two very very slow blinks of her eyes, acknowledgment.
At home on my kitchen windowsill I have a shred of pelargonium stolen from someone else’s window box, a present for a friend who cannot keep sprigs of basil from the supermarket alive yet dreams of being a gardener. He only has a tiny, bricked-in, West-facing balcony that looks dismally over a supermarket car park. I’ve shown him photos of how, in an Australian climate at least, you can grow a lot of food in such a space. When I saw this still-flowering window box with not just red and pink but also the darker, sultrier, more sophisticated velvetty maroon flowers, I filched a bit, peeled from the undermost hem of the plant where the person caring for it would lose least enjoyment. A few paces further on I found an empty plastic cup. Scooped up a cupful of leaves for the bottom layer and then a handful of rich dark friable soil. Stowed the incipient plantmonster in there and will nurture it until it has begun to send out some roots, hopefully before I leave Berlin, so then it can be passed on to its new owner with hopefully some chance of surviving the grey winter.
As a child in the tropics I used to worry about the trees, who seemed to me buried to the neck in hot, foetid soil, unable to move, >trapped!!< It took me years to work out that this kind of simple projection is not really compassion, does not help anyone. Years, and some lambasting from a Tibetan Buddhist nun who yelled, “You have too much compassion & no wisdom! No wisdom!” In any case one imagines suffocating heat is less of a problem for a German tree.
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rodney the radish
I found a radish! Just sitting in the middle of the road all by itself. It looked a little bruised and chipped. Poor little radish.
