flu grad

Gardening is a lot like dealing with people.  You can learn all sorts of stuff,  know this friend or that who is very good at gardening – but the plants will do what they do.  And the connections, the similarities, the roots and rhizomes, they will still do what they do too.  Like the sea thistle

I chose with love, had potted  for me by Josh who is a professional gardener: it bloomed once and gave up.  Josh says it happens.  I felt I had failed.

With people as with plants there are wonderful one offs.   Katherine arrived at my door and said “I saw you.”  Mouth agape, I stared at her.   “ I saw you” she said again “and you were ill.  So I made you some soup.” 

She made me the best of broths which I have named Malka – the Hebrew word for beautiful – and, survivor of childhood illness, emotional vandalism on the part of her mother and four years of bronchitis when she came from SA to England,  she is the first person to recognize the  toll this  was  going to take of me.  She stopped me and I immediately apologized “I have kept you too long …”   “No” she said “that is how you spend energy and Anna, you haven’t got it. 

You need to rest.  That is your work now.”

My second Christmas card arrived on New Year’s Eve.  It read “(sorry about the card Anna).  It’s Carly from the back garden.  Haven’t seen you

and me and the shop are worried.  Hope all is OK.   Love “– and her telephone number.   I had learned to limit my calls so I had to wait to ring back and then I said “Carly – it’s Anna” and the voice came back ”Omigawd, I’m so glad to hear from you.”     The shop is where she and I often meet with her big sweet dog Nula and where I buy the newspapers which I stopped even thinking about.    In the course of that conversation, she said something which is a profound statement of her background, mine and where we come from – “so great to hear your voice” she said.  “I was afraid it would be a man.”  Because when you die, your male relatives, the doctor, the vicar, the police make the call.   In the context of not knowing, male voices mean bad news.

The nicest meter reader on the 6 Jan said as she came down the hall “Did you have a nice Christmas ?” and I said “I don’t know, I lost it.”  She was immediately sympathetic and told my next door neighbour Sarah who has always been kind if not close.  Sarah bought me apple juice and I can see her in the red woolly hat that suits her well handing me the carton and tulips.

  “Late Christmas present” she said.  “Just get better.”

My nearest and dearest are not near – Ginny is in Warwickshire, Snowdrop is in Northumberland.  Buns is busy surviving and SR is in Gloucester, my son has a killer schedule – but they stuck.  When I asked everybody not to phone – they emailed.   Never was a woman more fortunate.  I found my way back to watching something I enjoyed on television – thin on the ground but I found it.  I ate supper and sat in a chair. 

I began reading Yellowface which is intelligently written if depressing and two chapters in when I hesitated, I found the writer had described this as a book about loneliness.  That I could relate to, not endless technology and wanting success, not a friend in sight and anxiety bouncing off the page.  But using it as a reader got me back to re read Pale Rider, Laura Spinney’s history of  the Spanish Flu.

I shall always remember Carly’s deep fruit and nut voice saying “But Anna what is it ?”   and me saying  “It’s flu Carly and it killed millions of people worldwide in  1918.”

The simplest actions require energy I didn’t know I used.  Bath shower and hair drying is soon but not yet, and every day in an adventure, a slow adventure because my age is an added complication to recovery as well as illness.  Now I am up against that strange modern denial which elides “Oh you were ill?” into “but you’re better now.”   

Not so fast, Kleinfelder.  Every year a small number of people have a bad time with influenza I have made it thus far, graduated through the illness programme.  I am a flu grad.