Bohemia Village Voice

Camelia

In contravention of his usual determination to be strong and show no emotion, a tear-drop formed in the corner of his eye, picked its way through the stubbly undergrowth on his cheek and dropped onto the soil. Others followed.
He checked the production line with a simultaneous sniff and a wipe of his sleeve and returned to his labour. A labour of love in his most cherished haunt.
That his potting shed had survived decades of being battered by the almost incessant south-westerly was something of a miracle. It was now held together by an assortment of Heath Robinsonesque solutions, of which he was at one and the same time proud and embarrassed. If only other things had been enduring. No, not ‘other things’, damn it. His marriage to the lovely Jenny.
He could predict with unerring accuracy the arrival and denomination of the elements. With the same precision, he could foretell the date on which each species of plant would blossom. Yet, for all this unerring prescience, he had not been able to anticipate their demise. An ugly cocktail of foolishness and self-directed anger splashed over him.
Had he been so lost in his ‘little project’, the teeming flower and vegetable beds and the small orchard at the end of their plot, that he had failed to see the signs? He desperately tried to reassure himself that there had been no signs. She had left without warning. How could she, after all that they had been through together?
Wracked with self-doubt, he even questioned the meaning and value of that togetherness. Perhaps their shared enjoyment had been an illusion and her sudden departure his just dessert for contributing little more to the relationship than a constant supply of cut flowers, peerlessly tasty produce and progress reports. The thought that he must have deserved this, wrestled pointlessly with the lack of a convincing logical explanation for the dramatic shift in his circumstances.
Exhausted by the struggle between acceptance and disbelief, he cursed himself for trying to think things through. Thinking so hard got in the way of doing and he had so much to do. More than ever, now that she had gone.
Fighting the arthritis in his fingers, he worked and reworked the compost, pausing only to add another shake of the special ingredient from its earthenware container. When the mixing was completed, he set the soil to one side, retrieved a hammer from the shelf above his head and smashed the container with four well-aimed blows. He slowly picked up the pieces and dropped them into the waiting pot. Then, holding in place the infant shrub – Jenny’s favourite – he carefully emptied the compost around it.
He drew a grubby paw to his cheek to dam the river of tears that had started to flow again. He sighed. His power over life and death may be limited to the control of aphids and caterpillars, but at least this way, she would live on through the rich blooms of the camelia.