Our garden
I pull the handles down, simultaneously, hearing my mother’s voice in my head, warning me to be careful with the locking mechanism. I push the heavy sliding doors open with my entire body. I grip the handle at the curve closest to the door, so it doesn’t flick back up and closed, and as soon as a gap appears, I push my right shoulder in. All the way open I push them, first the door on the right and then the one on the left, tripling the living room in size, turning outside inside in.
I grab my rolled-up towel from the low bench, and cradle my book close to my body. The scent of freshly applied sunscreen wafts around me. My bare feet leave the cool marble and hop over the sharp edge of the locking mechanism and the metal railing. I land on warm brick and feel grains of sand and dirt clinging to the soles of my feet. The next step is cool, damp grass, dew clinging to the wild stalks and patches of moss. Two paces and a quarter turn to the left is the perfect spot. A slight slope, my face and book south-eastwards and on the high ground. I lie my book down in the grass and grab two corners of the pink terry cloth. With a flourish, I unroll the towel and imagine myself an illusionist, revealing a perfectly laid-out isle of adventure in a sea of shining green. Bird song from the forest and ducklings cheeping for their mothers from the ditch disappear to the background as I lie myself down on my belly. My feet stick out from my isle and my toes find blades of grass to curl around. I leaf through my book and find the page I last encountered, even without a bookmark. I feel the sun on my arms and back and lose myself in the story.
The only things capable of pulling me back out are: dosing off and catnapping in the sun. A dulling of the story, a valley in the tension, and my eye being caught by an insect balancing on a blade of grass, or the way a seed with fluffy parachute is almost detached from the dandelion flower head, but still clinging on. The last method of untethering from my bookish realm is my favourite way of being reeled back into reality. It is when someone else decides to venture into this garden, drawn by the sun, racing from smooth marble to warm brick and jumping up to curved sandstone and leaping over the concrete edge into the cool blue. This results in a splash and violent attack of water raining down on me, my book and my moment of peace. Good thing I am lying down on a towel.
The back garden of my youth, our summer living room, seems so small now. As a child, it was my entire world. It strikes me that this is the particular memory that emerges. I could devote an entire series to just this place.
I remember the garden before, with the swing and the rope ladder and concrete tiles and the hammock and the ice-cold sheet pool and raspberries clinging to the wall. I recall plastic cups with watery lemonade and cans of whipped cream, directly squirted into giggling mouths. The garden before is sitting below the umbrella of the black locust in the corner, wholly protected from the sudden rain.
I remember the garden during, with the digging and the unearthing and the brick houses and ant colonies and wet diapers and endless amounts of black soil. During is lunch laid out on the brick wall of the moment, and tiny hands eager to help while standing in the way of measurable progress for the digging. During is wet clothes and laughter, not knowing how to climb back out when the water starts to fill up the newly erected pool.
I remember the garden after, the carefully laid out lava rock, the floating animals with their inflated grins, the shimmer of rippling water on the garden wall, the powerful stream pushing against my back and infusing the pool water with chlorine and salt. After is the clatter of the valve and screams when dead mice are found in the filter. It is gliding through the water, floating, carried by the saline wet. It is old things in new places, carefully blooming white in spring.
I remember the garden continuously, the green wire fence and dreams of thick black ice and hot chocolate, the memories of wobbling and drifting in the tiny tub, the endless project of the blue sailboat and the never-ending story of its restoration. I remember mum wanting to preserve the crisp winter image, and the birds eating the cherries before we could, and dad being certain the plums would ripen to deep purple even after plucking them green and unyielding. I remember the people, the people, the people: from everywhere, from all of us, from around us.
View on the author’s childhood garden during a summer storm, August 2014
The garden is perpetually changing and knows many faces. The garden is autumn, when rotten apples are collected to launch into the forest with a baseball bat. It’s baking forest cakes on the quay with wood chips and moss, a suitable enough approximation of stewed meat with its shades of brown and the grooved furrows in the soft wood. These dishes are enlivened by the tiny, bright yellow winter jasmine, flowering well into the next phase of the garden. But while it remains autumn, the garden is wet leaves and a first effort to replenish the stock of firewood, preparing for winter and cold.
When winter arrives, the garden is often deserted. Entire weeks can go by where no one enters the garden at all. We only venture into our outside again when the rain is heavy, and the long ladder is needed to clean out the gutters, or when snow falls, or the potential for ice arises. Winter is looking at the garden through the glass sliding doors, closing the curtains early and keeping the warmth inside.
The garden in spring starts slow and creeps up on you. Spring starts with fishing out dead leaves from the pool and counting frogs. It’s buying an insane amount of bags with salt, emptying out the supermarket salt shelf, and waiting impatiently for the water to become clear and crisp. The warm enough weather officially commences when I awake in the morning from the sound of a door closing and a splash following, and slipping on the wet footsteps in the hall. This coincides with the blue carpet of hyacinth unfolding from beneath the fruit trees.
The summer garden is gloriously riotous. It’s the annual effort to revive the colourful annuals from May previously, the endless adding of lavender, the efforts to cultivate a vegetable garden. Summer is huddled together around the fire pit, warming ourselves from the last swim and sharing stories while smoke makes our eyes tear. Summer is the cherry and the plum and the apple transforming their white floral dresses in fruit we barely get to eat before the wasps and magpies and jackdaws and jays get to them. It’s the continuous rebuilding of rope bridges between trees and finding places of quiet and solitude, high up in the trees or lying on the trampoline or reading a book. Preferably on a terry cloth island amidst the sea of grass.•
Inspired by Lia Purpura