Pruning the Roses
I was lost in the act of pruning with my new secateurs in the front garden on a bright afternoon; selecting the most promising points of growth, the gardener’s practice of persuasion and control. The chirpy afterschool babble of children began to swell up from across the river. My dear boy would soon be home, and we’d eat fresh apple cake in the garden. Meanwhile, just a few more snatched moments to secure the promise of a shower of scarlet blooms next summer.
The running flatslap footfall of a school-weary lad approached, but as I peered over the shrubbery, it wasn’t my boy. His best friend Stewart stuttered a wide-eyed message: “It’s Ben. K-quick - an an an accident, please come.” The shiny new secateurs fell to the earth, to be found, mossed and rusted many years later. I stumbled after the leggy school top sprinter, eager to catch up to ask him for the what where when and how of it all. He was urgently nimble, constantly beyond reach, often out of sight. The bare quarter of a mile assumed the proportions of Olympus. As I ran, cold fear swarmed against my ribs, as my mind limbered up to handle whatever awaited.
We fled across the bridge, down the cobbly road towards the school. Opposite the ford, we turned into a small crescent, where Stewart’s small hand directed me through a hedgebound gateway, and on through the open door of a bungalow. Such moments in life take on a surreal air of raw unscripted theatrics. I smelled fear, heard kindly mutterings, but through it all I only registered a brave subdued whimper, as distinctive to me as his very first cry. Two or three women surrounded and ministered to him, limply perched on a dining chair in the middle of a small beigely impeccable sitting room. As I entered, the tableau dismantled as the women stepped aside for me, their faces etched with concern, one clutching a blood-stained towel. I felt the montage re-form around my now kneeling presence. Ben’s restrained whimpers loosened into deep sobs of relief. “We’ve called the ambulance”, said the towel bearer. I spluttered a mix of gratitudes to all around, as my own repressed fear morphed into maternal mantras of comfort and calm for my seven years’ son, suddenly so small, so vulnerable, so precious, as the blood oozed thick and darkly from his head. “It was a car hit him”, announced Stewart crisply. “A Mercedes” he added, with a touch of awe. The elderly driver of which had apparently melted away.
“Beware, an accident,” had said the fortuneteller as she scrolled an elegant finger across the pudgy proffered palm of my then two year old lad .. “I see a car, and the letter M”. Fortunately she then transferred her focus to a special digital wrinkle that foretold a charismatic career as a ‘uniquely gifted kind of teacher’. So at least there had been a prediction of time up ahead ....
I have no clear recall of the ensuing events: only the calm efficiency of the paramedics, the long blind windowless siren ride through the familiar twists and turns of the road to town; the small pallid body borne by strong arms into the hospital hive that not so very long ago had coaxed him from my body. Later, the black-eyed neatly stitched boychild, lost in a vast whiteness of bed, closely observed through the night by a neatness of nurses, and a mess of a mother slumped in the cold plastic arms of the bedside chair.
From where I sit today, that event has long faded into blessed historic resolution and relief, forever highlighted by the knowledge that another millimetre, another millisecond, would have severed an artery. A mere millibite in the cosmic scheme, that would have severed a future. Now all that remains is a thin scar on the greying temple of a rather special kind of teacher. And just one of many deep notches of gratitude carved into a mother’s old heart.
Today I laid the fire with a crumpled newspaper that let slip twisted glimpses of daily shattered worlds and deadly statistics. Across the room, the radio warbled of evermore lives brutally erased and maimed, fragmented and divested - thousands of motherless limbless children and even more thousands of bereft mothers. Every day I feel my heart attune to their relentless fears and pain. Far too many innocent victims of mankind’s shameful explosive furies and insatiable greeds. So much more to account for than casualties of the eruptions and storms of nature’s altogether more predictable unpredictability.
Once in awhile, we hear a stirring tale of miraculous rescue or escape. Those blessed millimetres and milliseconds. Sometimes, small tired birds crash into my windows and fall to the ground. Some subtle equation twixt speed and trajectory determines why some will die, and others will recover with just a stunning headache. Happenstance stalks every precious life, be it a human being or any other being - each just a fleeting, bittersweet, electro-chemical atomic dance …
… O how I await another summer’s tumbling of scarlet roses