• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 626 0

the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body. I remember my mother and I having a tea party in our garden one day, and looking at her and really thinking about her for the first time: this is my sweet mother who knows how to pour tea into acorn cups and make teacakes out of fir cones, who can make doll's hats out of maple keys and doll's dresses from leaves and flowers. And who knows just the right way to push seeds into the ground with her thumb. My father said my mother had a green thumb, but I knew it was brown, and her knees too, and that this was much better, the earth under her nails just like mine, the earth making the fine lines of our hands suddenly visible. I can still feel her hand over mine, her thumb on mine, and the hard little seed, like a pellet or a stone, under my thumb as we pushed together into the soft earth. She showed me how to plant for height and shape and colour and scent, how to plant for winter. She taught me that teasels attract goldfinches. If you plant the right flowers, the whole garden can become a bird bouquet. Every garden is like a living house, she said, you should be able to walk right into the centre of a garden and lie down … and watch the leaves move, like a curtain through an imaginary window.

– Please lie down next to me, said Avery.

He took Jean's hand and led her to the narrow bed, the girlhood bed she'd moved from the house in Montreal, and they lay on top of the sheets in the heat.

– When my mother was in the hospital she asked my father to bring flowers, her flowers. Watching him cut them from her garden was the first time I understood how ill she was. That day my father wandered around the kitchen boiling eggs, boiling potatoes, making lots of toast. He didn't know what to do. He made the few things he knew how to cook. We ate in silence at that little red-and-white kitchen table, and everything tasted terrible. We listened to each other chewing and swallowing. Everything looked the same, the little square bumpy salt-and-pepper cellars with their red plastic caps, and the little bit of lace under the butter dish. But suddenly it was a different house, a replica of the house I knew, and when we left to take the flowers to my mother after lunch, I started to cry. And then my father started to cry too and he had to stop the car by the side of the road.

Avery could feel her tears through his shirt.

– There are so many things, he said quietly, that we can't see but that we believe in, so many places that seem to possess an unaccountable feeling, a presence, an absence. Sometimes it takes time to learn this, like a child who suddenly realizes for the first time that the ball he threw over the fence has not disappeared. I used to sit with my mother in Grandmother Escher's Cambridgeshire garden and we would feel that strong wind from the Ural Mountains on our faces. The wind is invisible, but the Ural Mountains are not! Yet why should we believe in the Ural Mountains that we can't see when we're sitting in a garden in Cambridgeshire and not believe in other things, an inner knowledge we feel just as keenly? Nothing exists independently. Not a single molecule, not a thought.

– ‘A garden must have a path,’ my mother used to say, and she was right. A path that has worn its way into the earth, sunken cobbles, grass beginning to grow through the cracks, said Jean, a path that has been set into the earth through constant use. The way stone stairs over centuries hollow out in the middle. Imagine mere boots being able to wear away stone – the way some stories bend in the middle after centuries of telling. The ground knows where we have walked …

At night instead of a bedtime story sometimes my mother and I would look at seed catalogues. She sent to England for some of them, just to dream, and she would whisper a garden for me. I would imagine it with her, every detail, the ivy, the bench beneath the willow, the snow of blossoms in the warm spring air. Until I fell asleep.

Avery stroked Jean's face. He leaned down and took off her sandals and drew the