Help

Chapter 15

I’ve got a gardener! The lovely Anne who is excellent at doing what I ask and checking if I’m ok with the way she has done it. She’s my Avatar who carries out all the things that I can’t do. This is of course within the two hours a week that she comes, which means that I have to be really selective about what jobs she does. “That’s an interesting scene” says Bob, when he spots Anne kneeling with her bottom sticking out of a flowerbed whilst I gesticulate with my “Pointing Stick” which is actually a bamboo cane. It’s fun being the Madam Of The Garden but I’m also fighting back tears because I would have liked to be doing that weeding myself.

I ask Anne to clear grass, dandelions and anything else growing into the base of shrubs, young trees and favourite plants. This is to help them to get their nourishment without too much competition. Easily reached light pruning and dead heading are jobs that I can still do on flat ground. Otherwise everything goes its own way. If I’m in a rose coloured glasses mood, I think that it’s never looked more beautiful. On our grassed slope, grandly named The Orchard, consisting of one pear, one apple and two junior plum trees, we let the grass grow long and with the help of Bob’s nephew, who stops by on a flying visit from New Zealand, we sow yellow rattle and ragged robin as well as planting some tall blue and white flowers from bulbs. Meadow buttercups, campions, ragwort and various grasses full of fluffy pollen all eventually wave gently in the long period of dry sunny days.

Looking around a shop specialising in tools which help elderly and/or disabled people, I see some gadgets which might help me. At the time I can’t bring myself to buy any “aids”, but a few days later I brace myself to go back and purchase an elongated shoehorn and a stick with a grabber on the end to save bending down. “Oh yes”, says my friend Susie, over a mug of coffee, ”They’re both good tools.” Apparently she’s been using them for years. Susie is three years younger than me and I find myself thinking that I’ve done rather well, to manage without help for this long. What is going on in my head? A secret competition that the more able bodied I am, the more superior I am to other people? I’m glad that I’ve spotted this crazy thinking. Hopefully I can drop it now.

Bob works his way around the garden fitting extra slabs into some of the steeper steps to make them shallower for me. Where that isn’t possible he installs bannisters of wood or rope that I can pull myself up with, when my arms are having a good day. Maybe someday we’ll have to leave this place if it becomes physically impractical to continue living here. At present I dread the possibility and yet that insecurity makes every moment here more precious.

One day in early summer after doing some weeding, I sit with a glass of water on the bench at the top of the garden. Aching in most of my bones and with the vague sick headache which is pretty constant. Closing my eyes I listen to the birds singing. The sun warms my upturned face and eyelids. I find myself talking to Life, a not infrequence occurrence although I’ve never thought to ask a question until this moment. “Hi Beloved, of which I am a small part, how are you doing?” To my amazement an answer comes straight back. “Oh, you know, aching all over the place and with some wounds. Lots that’s beautiful of course.”

“You are not so different from me,” I say, “Except that you are on a much bigger scale in every way”. We sit in comfortable silence. After a bit I decide to tell Life how rotten I’m feeling, “It’s almost embarrassing to tell you my tiny troubles, how I ache and feel so tired with an almost permanent headache, and not knowing what I may be doing to cause that.”

“That’s exactly it”, says Life, “I don’t know if I cause the volcanos and earthquakes that rip me up.” There is a pause then Life says, “You know, eventually we’ll both fall apart and disappear to dust.” “What do you think I should do about the garden?” I ask. “Muddle along,” comes the answer without hesitation, “That’s what I do”.

The question is still there, am I ill or old? Will I get better or is this how it will be from now on? I have no idea how to move forward. Time continues to plod on anyway.

My lovely gardener becomes ill and isn’t able to help any more. Of course I’m sorry for her, and ashamed to be feeling almost as sorry for me. The jobs I had wanted her to do sit on my gardening “to do” list. I know that I can’t keep up with the weeding. Despite my best efforts to “Let the garden go its own way” there are so many times when I can’t bear seeing all the pretty arrangements of shrubs having grass and weeds smothering them until they are slowly swamped. Is this what all my visioning and work has been for? To see it disappear under a pile of nature’s whims, as if what I’d created had never been there. I’m sick of trying not to be judgemental, trying to see “Just a different kind of look,” when thistles spring up between the orange and yellow potentillas. I don’t like it and I haven’t the physical ability to stop it.

And I’m cross with what a fool I’ve been. Anne and I had laboriously cleared all the Bloody Mind-Yer-Own-Sodding-Business the year before. Bob had put down an actual ton of clean soil and we’d all helped to divide and plant dozens of leptinella platts black to be an interesting low ground cover in the so called minimalist area by the flight of gently curving steps beyond the small pond. I was a fool because even as the man at the garden centre was telling me what good weed suppressants the pots of leptinella would be, he was holding one in his hand and pulling little weeds out of the close growing ferny foliage. I met his eyes and smiled, raising my eyebrows. Yet I still went ahead. Of course the leptinella is not going to supress weeds. Especially Mind Your Own Effin Business. Nothing but concrete or a flame thrower could do that.

That’s enough complaining for the moment. I stamp into the house as impressively as my shuffle can manage and have a stout cup of tea.

At Buckland Hall where I stay for a four day retreat, I go outside very little in contrast to my usual habit of dashing out for gasps of sky and trees as if indoors were somewhere to escape from. What an old, old habit. A sense of deep safety is beginning to creep through me. The safety of a roof and warmth, shelter from the elements of cold, rain and summer heat. Maybe this disability is an opportunity for me to fall in love with home and end the ancient habit of having a constant little shadow of fear whenever I’m indoors.

Time goes on. Life and pain go on. Disaster strikes. In a desperate attempt to sooth my pain, Bob fits the bath with handles and a non slip mat and helps me into warm water with Epsom Salts. As I attempt to turn something twists in my groin and I’m in agony. Somehow he heaves me out and after a horrible night he takes me to the surgery in the morning. It’s a different doctor. “It’s a twisted muscle,” he says. Apparently this happens easily with muscles weakened by steroids. He says that it’s not unusual for a person to have a long period of painful weak muscles whilst their adrenals are recovering. It’s called Myofascial Pain Syndrome which is apparently not unusual after prolonged use of steroids.

The new doctor prescribes some medication strong enough to relieve the pain I’ve had for so long. This makes an enormous difference to my quality of life. Anyone who has, or has had chronic pain, will know what I mean. It had worn me down, depressed me and I’d constantly struggled not to lose my temper as every small setback felt like a last straw.

Being pain free gives me more energy and as the months creep by it seems that my adrenals are beginning to function again. The weak, but now relatively pain free muscles in my arms and legs, are very slowly getting stronger. My concentration is better and my balance is beginning to improve. I feel as if I’m land that is rising slowly as the crushing glaciers retreat.

I used to assume that growing older meant becoming gradually more and more incapacitated. But it isn’t turning out that way for me. I’m getting deafer and have tried hearing aids and then parked them for the moment. Possibly if I persisted with making adjustments I could get more benefit from them. Bird song is still a pleasure though I know that Bob hears some notes that are beyond my range. That makes him sound rather like a bat but without the flight and squeaking.

I’d thought that this memoir was going to end with a chapter about letting go of being a gardener. Grieving would be talked about as I imagined watching the garden going back to the natural way of things, as if I’d never touched it. There would, I thought, be some hopeful plans to find less physically challenging interests. It turns out that this particular ending has been shelved for the moment. There is a reprieve of some sort. We don’t know how much better I’ll get and for how long, as I’m seventy five now.

“Bob”, I say when we are having a glass of wine at the table on the patio outside the house. “I’ve been thinking about a cunning plan to make our garden safer, easier to work in, and better for nature. “But it’s pretty radical.”