Winter Solstice

I can’t claim to be a grown-up, and live in terror of the day when they find out I’m faking it. But after half a lifetime of jumping up and down with anticipation of birthdays, Christmas, the Easter bunny and tax rebates, I think I’ve decided that my favorite day of the year is the 21st of December. There are trees in houses that ward off winter, bright packages in supplication and lights of good cheer against the dark and the cold begging entrance at the windows. In the joy to be found in front of the fire and at a table soon to be groaning with bountiful festivity, it is this night that turns my gaze forward.

On this day of early darkness and late light, I’ll pause amid the cooking preparations and step outside into the cold and survey a garden in the depths of sleep. In the west, a pale sunset and I imagine these lands on this night thousands of years gone by, when my ancestors huddled in the cold and dark and fear in a savage, unforgiving world lit only by fire. I wonder when it was that they understood that the very next day would bring longer light. I wonder when it was that they knew that this was the end of the darkness.

Because it’s on the 21st December that I know the days start getting longer again and for a gardener, it’s really the beginning of the calendar year. Twelfth Night, three weeks from then, is when the Christmas decorations come down. Three weeks from that, the daffodils start pushing their first cheeky heads from the ground, as if in defiance of the worst Father Winter still has to offer. And offer the worst he does, as winter is a jealous and cruel soul, keeping his grip on us as long as he can.

But there comes a day when the crocus blooms, those great triumphant heralds of spring, in defiance of the still short days and the late snows that are winter’s feeble toehold. Spring will not be held back; she will fling her multi-colored boa across her shoulders and smack Winter in the face and banish him for another year.

It’s in this time that I love to walk the neighbourhood and peer like a nosy biddy into others’ gardens. My neighbour to the right has a far better crop of crocus at this time of year, but then he only has a wee terrier to worry his garden, I have boys who play football. Another neighbor didn’t prune his butterfly bushes last autumn, and I notice the leylandii hedge at the top of the road has been uprooted and replanted with yew. Yew is almost as fast growing and is a very thirsty hedge. Some say it’s where we get Yule logs from. My garden has early iris as do many others, and the daffs hike their spikes in a race against the tulips, long after St. David’s Day. The pussywillows are budding as is the willow at the bottom of the garden and spring, the harlot, will not be refused. Even the roses, pruned with a vengeance in November, are poking pink buds out in defiance of a gardener’s discipline. All this a scant eight weeks away, which helps to make the dwindling days of autumn bearable.

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Diva

It wasn’t heartbreak that brought her to my door that night, but rather a sense of grief for pain inflicted, a search for contrition and ease of the soul.  Words had been spoken, intemperately but without malice, formulated to a context misunderstood across unknown frontiers, and had caused pain.  As many words inevitably do.  She is a kind soul, really.

My door and wine rack are always open to her and I’m glad she knows that because safe havens are important, for the friends that seek safe anchorage as well as for me.  I had been spending too much time looking out to sea for another ship, that one, the one you wait to come in, one that had to find port under its own sail, and I had lost a sense of mending my own nets.  I opened the door for her, opened the bottle, and laid out the nets.

It was still warm and dry, so we sat outside on my terrace, in what by day is a riot of green and other colours, weeds, pots and snail shells, but after sunset becomes a night garden.  The air was light and smelled of damp earth from an early evening’s watering, combined with cigarette smoke and the whiff of whiskey we poured to oil her grief and mine.  Light spilled out from the living room, sorry tales punctuated by throwing the ball for a dog happy for the unusual play so late at night.  The bells of the village church chimed down the hours into morning, but we didn’t hear them.

Her story is important only to her and me, and is not, in any case, of great interest outside the confessional of the friend.  But there came a moment, when the wheels had been well greased, when I asked her what she knew of opera.  I hasten to add that I am no great expert here and may not even be classified as a fan.  But I told her the story of my brother-in-law who, on a youth’s trip to Italy, witnessed (La Bohème?  La Traviata?) at the Roman amphitheatre in Verona and fell hard for opera that night.  This fired her imagination.  And drunken pedantry in me.

I don’t know anything about opera, she said.

And so with wide open windows and no upstairs neighbours, I gave her at high volume the Top 40 introduction to what little I know: the exquisite male duet from the first act of ‘The Pearl Fishers’ by Bizet, the Flower Duet from Lakmé, by Delibes, and that old opera karaoke standard, ‘Nessun Dorma’. 

But it was the love and death thralls of Violetta in ‘La Traviata’ that captured her, and for a few moments at least that summer night, dissolved the nets and let her swim free in the pleasure of music and voice, and put aside, at least for a bit, the yoke of the confessional.  She freed herself on another woman’s love and grief.

When the last of the whiskey was downed she said, ‘I want you to take me to the opera, Bri, I want you to take me to La Traviata.’

‘The next time it comes to Covent Garden’, I said, ‘we’ll go over to London and do it proper.’

And we’ll go for a drink after, I said to myself.  But not to the Nag’s Head.  I walked in there once and drank with the ghosts of Maugham, Isherwood, Auden and one other.  But I won’t go back there again till that ship on the horizon makes port.

The King’s Man and His Horse

I have no neighbours upstairs for now, and so can play the music as loudly as I wish.  It has been so very long since I have been here and poems and old stories and dreams haunt me back to these old halls and the doors I once used to open without knocking.  I once used not to care about not knocking, because I was so curious as to what I would happen upon, and I still don’t care about knocking but because for way, way too long, I stopped caring what I’d find on the other side of those doors.  I lost my curiosity, I suppose.  A loss of immediacy of knowledge both acquired and purveyed.  I once raced through roads of ancient forests because there was a place I had to be to send a message to someone whom I needed to connect with what I had to say.  There were cards and parcels that needed to be franked that day that I thought of them and needed to have the date-stamp acknowledgement of my intent.

 

I am no less in love now than I was so many years ago in those ancient forests.  I just don’t have the address now.

 

I once wrote from beaches that brought me alive, because I knew you heard the waves against the shingles as I did, and you heard the lap of the tides and saw the seal in the harbour turn his head to the western sun as I turned mine to the eastern sun every morning, watching you as you still slept, waiting for so many years for you to wake up.  Our own Brigadoon.  The book you kept and haven’t read yet.

 

I can take you back to that beach, if I can recreate it as ours, but I can’t take you back to the house in the mountains I wanted so much to share with you, because the mountains are still there, but the house is gone, and how many more houses and mountains are we going to lose before you understand that houses are only as sound as the mountains you lay under them?  And only as strong as you want them to be? 

 

My god, the mountains you and I crossed! 

 

It serves no use to weep streams nor to let rivers run the course they are meant to run.  I know how to turn the course of rivers, I have done it before.

 

So many years ago there was a spice rack before me in a village supermarket and I remember learning the Flemish word for cinnamon when I said to you over the phone that I would never give up on you. 

 

Zimt.

 

 

 

 

Roses in the Wreckage

 

Roses in the Wreckage

 

 

It started with a puppy, and ended with hello.

Monty didn’t run with the pack of other puppies but the day I came to pick one, he was eventually found, shivering and frightened, hiding behind boxes in the garage.  Love was instant and everlasting.  He soon adjusted to the open space of my garden and with age and confidence he began exploring the neighborhood.  It was soon clear a fence would be required.  I put this off for way too long until a knock on the door started a chain of events likened to that butterfly in the Amazon that spawned Hurricane Katrina.

One of the first expressions I picked up in Flemish off Cartoon Network was “Ik bin bang”; “I’m afraid.”  So when I opened the front door that afternoon, to a rather frightened woman who I had sometimes seen in the lane that ran next to my house, I understood that she was frightened of dogs, and had been all her life.  I also knew that I feared another knock on the door, the one that would bring tragic news, because I didn’t keep Monty safe. 

 Come a warm, dry day last September, a friend and I installed a simple and cheap affair of spikes, wire and a gate you could buy off the shelf at Brico.  Monty was curtailed, but safe, and I no longer had the worry about him running out into the road.  Which was just as well, because it saved room for the mountain of worry that was to come.  Unbeknownst to us, one of the pikes we shoved into the ground hit a shallow oil line that ran from the underground tank to the furnace in the cellar.  It was a small line, and no wider than a toothbrush, one centimetre either way would have missed it.   Except it didn’t.  One month later, 1500 litres of oil had leaked into the ground.  My worries were to be somewhat more substantial than no heat or hot water as winter settled in.

The Belgian environmental authorities must, by law, be notified of such incidents.  The contaminated soil has to be excavated, is washed if possible, and replaced.  I don’t know if this was done in my case.  However, this is a very expensive process, and in rural areas such as mine where buried oil tanks are still common, there is insurance for such eventualities.  The Hippocritical Oath for insurance companies is “First, Do Not Pay Out”, so this is currently under negotiation.   But the surrounding soil had to be dug out to a depth of 6 metres, and this also meant the garage had to be demolished, to get to the earth underneath.  Thus, what once was a healthy plot

Had become rubble.

 

 

And a crater.

But as these machines violated my soil and ripped out the work I had put in, so they tore down walls that might have taken years to unbrick.  This is Flanders, where you may have a nodding acquaintance with your neighbours years before you know their names, but my neighbours came by, those who could see the garden through the fences, and knew of my love and care, and lamented its loss while sharing the joke of the new swimming pool I was having dug.  They introduced themselves by first name, unheard of here.  I was touched and heartened by such neighborliness brought on by a hole in the ground.

Six months later.

You can’t always anticipate how the cues in your life will lead you down this road or that, because often you don’t have control, or you abdicate control, or you look around at your life and wonder how you lost control, and when you arrive at the end of a road you didn’t plot, you wonder, how did I get here?  This was not on my map and I don’t know if I can ever get back again to where I am meant to be.  Rubble had occluded the sunlight and I was without my compass of sunlight and time.

But that is the way of most of us and my garden is only a metaphor.  I had lost a sense of growth and seasons and the unnerving shake of that put me off the rhythm of my life.  There are other phosphorous bursts in this scenario, but they belong to other stories.   I had lost a desperate muse, and found no way of getting him back.

In effect, the work you put into a garden is your hope of future flowering.  In the destruction you think is your life, you plant seeds, nurture them, watch them grow, and somehow, some way, you learn to make the hard choices to bring it back to life. 

And sometimes to bring yourself back to life.  There are, sometimes, roses in the wreckage.

The Sidewalks of Brussels

One of my overwhelming impressions of Paris when I went there for the first time as a young man was that, not only would I never go there with my sister again, but that it was difficult to see the sights when you were constantly looking down.  The Parisians, then as now, were very nonchalant about the manner in which they allowed doggy detritus to foul the otherwise elegant trottoirs du Boulevard des Champs Elysées.  It was more like the Champs du Mars for the minefield of muck one had to negotiate.  Playing hopscotch with the butt-bombs, I was appalled that the French could allow this in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.  It was as if Leonardo painted a pimple on the Mona Lisa.

A week of professional training brought me to Brussels many years later, and it seemed as if it was déjà-poo all over again.  It even inspired a song:

“Doo-wop, doo-wop, step, step pretty, you’re spending a week in dog-poo city”

Or words to that effect.  I remember wondering if this was a Francophile thing, or a European thing, (Swiss dogs, by law, do not poo), but more than that, why no one seemed to mind any more than they minded flicking a cigarette end in the gutter?   It was amazing to watch the well-heeled and the down-at-heel alike deftly side-stepping these canine calling cards as easily as a loose cobblestone with only the faintest of a Gallic turning of the nose.   I had forgotten that I once had Paris and was not so fortunate.  

Years later I was to return to Paris with my fiancée, not my sister, and was able to walk the Champs Elysées while reading the paper except to be almost run over by a limousine carrying the Queen of England.  The streets had been cleared of muck-mines and on my return to Brussels several years later, things had quite improved.  Signs forbidding the pooing of dogs were ubiquitous, and in the parks there were even bins dedicated to this purpose, provided it was well wrapped in a doggy-doo-bag.   

One of the by-products of acquiring a dog is an education in waste management.  Monty trained up pretty well, and today will now happily be closed up in the kitchen all day, not touching food and drink like an aesthete, and boiling it all day until I come home to let him out to do his bidness in the garden.  Sometimes I’ll then chuck it over the fence into the goat paddock on the premise that goats have no self-esteem and don’t give a, well, you know.  But Monty is a creature of habit and when we go walkies to get the paper on Sunday mornings, he always pauses in front of one particular house and makes a deposit.  One such morning, I had no doggie bags with me and walking a few metres further on, I turned to be greeted by a torrent of Flemish abuse by the owner of the house whose pavement Monty had blessed.  I explained that I was on my way to get more doggy bags (an expedient, if useful lie) and would return presently to relieve his sidewalk of said befoulment. 

Feeling impressed with the forceful change in attitude, though of course somewhat shamed, I returned a few minutes later to the front of his house and made a dramatic turn in front of his windows of scooping the product in a perfumed poo-sack, and, tying it to the dog lead in the chic fashion of country dog-owners, proceeded home, feeling finally welcome in the new Belgium.      

Mt. Pilatus, or, The End of The Potting Shed

It’s been a while since I’ve been here.  Time and life and love, sore and compelling, froze me in my own tracks and rendered me speechless.  I have thought often in the past few months of closing this down, unsure if I had anything left I wanted to say.  But there’s plenty I want to say.  There are always runaway thoughts in my head, and observations and things I find beautiful, and contentious, and foolish, and brave, and I want to note them.   I had thought I had lost the capacity for saudades, but this week I brought a chapter of my writing to a close and opened a new one.  It’s time to close down something I loved because though I still love it, I feel keenly that it’s time for something else. 

 

I am in no small way surprised that I can do this.  Too often when you get used to one way of writing you stick with it because it is safe, or formulaic, or you get blinded by the praise of people who like it and look forward to the next same ole, same ole. 

 

I’ve run out of same ole.  And don’t want to retread past writings.  Writers in syndication have nothing left to say.

 

Below is my last gardening column for the Brussels Embassy Newsletter.  It’s been three years writing this and it’s time to move on.  And maybe that will inspire more here. 

 

I spent Boxing Day in a hotel, a Christmas gift from my cousin, over 2000 metres atop Mt. Pilatus above Luzern in Switzerland.  After an afternoon in a museum of Picasso and Klee, we travelled up the mountain by cabled gondola for almost an hour over children tobogganing below.  We munched on toasted chestnuts, chucking the shells out a small transom window for the scavengers of the night.  We bobbed to the top to skies that could only end with the curvature of the earth.  Blackbirds that never leave the heights of this mountain scavenged on winter lichen frozen into the sleeping granite.  

It was as if you were free of your cramped window seat on a plane in stacked descent, and could sit on the wing.  That afternoon, the skies were as clear as the eyes of a newborn.  The lakes around Luzern were deep and blue; you could see how the city played itself into the contours of the land it had settled in.  Come nightfall, I had hoped for stars, but the lights of the top of the mountain were too strong.  But even then, there was the sense of cold, and darkness, and the wonder of how those who came before us lived in a world lit only by moonlight on snowfields.  When candles and glass in thin windows were the purview of the wealthy.  When, in the age of my grandmother, the lights of stringed pearls along the lakes below did not exist.  The landscape was covered in jewels, and I could stand in the frozen night, not being master of all I surveyed, but wonderfully grateful and humbled at the gift that had been given me.  A sumptuous dinner of excellent company and good wine fed the enchantment of this place.  Plans were laid to see it in summer.

At the deepest hour of that night, I ventured outside to a temperature of -6C.  I was wrapped well and looking for stars in the thin atmosphere.  Content to be solitary in the frozen night a few thousand metres closer to starlight far more ancient than the lights below.  There was peace and stillness and unforgiving cold.

Or so I thought.

 Within days I was on a train back to Brussels.   And a few days after that my garden was buried in snow and a cold doubly harsh to my mountain top.  The earth froze and the snow lay old and brittle on the ground, Miss Haversham’s wedding cake left to dust and grime and the cold of age.  Venturing outside was painful and for a few short winter days I thought I’d never be warm again and longed for the first sunburn of summer.

But this is the stuff of the seasons and seasons will change and the earth moves on.  This is the last chapter of The Potting Shed.   All that needed to be said has been said; it’s time to say something different, casting a new light through other windows.  In a few weeks this space will carry a new column, tentatively called “Blogging Brussels”, observations of life in Belgium generally, Brussels in particular.

I’ve been pleased and humbled that there have been those who have enjoyed these scribblings.  You validate me as a writer and I hope I have been of help as a gardener.  Kathleen has the corner on cooking, my other passion. I will sit on another corner, watch Brussels go by, and write about that.

I wish you all the greenest of thumbs and the joy of watching good things grow.  Back soon.