The rains threatened. Task of the day - trimming liriope with blunt secateurs.
It was my one year work anniversary. People kept asking if I was working in the rain, and I smiled and said I wear a raincoat. They pitied and disparaged me, with my dirty fingernails and unkempt hair but I didn't care. Better than being stuck inside breathing toxic fumes of people. I could hear birds singing, if I kept quiet enough. And if I was still enough, I could watch plants grow and make their way toward the light.
I had been abandoned, yet again, in the garden. Everyone else had decided they were busy doing other things, vastly more important things that I couldn't comprehend. I watched the old folk, comfortable in their retirement, playing bowls on the fake lawn. After years of hard scrabble, bringing up squabbling children, they could now have fun. They bought brand new apartments and giant shiny new SUVs. They kept the children and grandchildren from visiting behind the gated walls. They nagged the gardeners and teased us and abused us at times, but none came out to help. They had better things to do I suppose, and that didn't include gardening.
At home Mum had been quieter lately, because I was keeping out of trouble, and busy, and after work I would go to my room and have a nap. She surprised me by doing some gardening the other week, putting in garlic chives in my raised plot herself and suggesting I plant garlic for winter. Dad picked up fallen wisteria leaves. He gathered them all up and put them in the rubbish bin, which I then emptied into the raised bed.
Auckland Transport contacted me and said I could plant groundcover flowers on the church roadside berms, and they would have no problem with it. In times past churchyards were places the faithful were buried, because they all wanted to be raised together at the resurrection. And people would plant flowers on their graves. But to my dismay I found out that people were no longer burying their loved ones, but incinerating them like cigarettes and scattering their ashes to the winds, and the churchyards converted to asphalt parking lots. At first I was righteously indignant at this, but then I later learned to let it go. Maybe people just don't believe anymore, or they wish to become fertiliser, and disappear into the ether. I can't make people believe a miracle if they don't want to see.
There's a no smoking sign outside our church, to stop people chucking butts into our garden but maybe it should say 'no rest for the wicked'. The rat race is to your right, stay out of the acid rain.
