Gillie left a comment on my previous posting and included the thought-provoking idea of 'blooming where I'm planted'. I realise it's something I've always tried to do, although at a few times in my life it has become rather more a case of making the best of a bad job.
Sometimes I have been where I didn't want to be, more often psychologically than physically.
For the past twenty or so years I have been mostly here, at home in my Victorian house, in my labour-intensive garden, mostly alone in the last six years of widowhood, surrounded by memories and echoes.
The family house, once rather crowded, is now comfortably spacious.
My husband's workshop, which I wrote about here......... well, look what has happened. Most of the plastic boxes containing nails and screws, the containers for lengths of string, the countless drill-bits and other assorted bodging and hitting tools are still in place in their wall-mounted compartments.
But the main space of his workshop has become a store-room for baby equipment.........the pushchair, high-chair, bouncing-about-chair, the baby bath and other essential items in pastel colours.
What was a severely, somewhat guarded masculine space has bloomed into something quite other.
There is much sadness in the thought that my husband and grand-daughter will not meet. He would have been totally captivated by her, a willing slave, as indulgent with her as he was with his own infant sons. But I wonder if he would have emptied his work-shop for her baby gear. I suspect he would have built another shed for the purpose.
But he has built a shed for what will soon become her purpose.
He built Walnut Cottage for our sons. It was their playhouse, but then it became a bike store, and later still a wheel-chair store. Now it needs to become a playhouse again.
The pattern of my life here feels like the seasonal changes in the garden, from the growth and freshness of spring and summer, to the ripeness and maturity of autumn before tipping back into the quiet solitude of winter. I appreciate these seasons equally.
I need them equally in my life.
I am blooming, not exactly where I'm planted, but where I am irrevocably rooted.
