Blessed Garden

Marsha’s feet tread lightly along the pavement like a snare drum beat with a heel thud accompaniment, her right foot swollen from an insect bite. Last evening, after a full day on the busy supermarket shop floor, she had been sitting out in her garden. Still in her leather bomber jacket and scarf from her journey home, she reflected over her Good News Bible, which was rested on her lap and opened to the book of Psalms. She nestled into her fold-a-away camping chair, the cool bluish air nipping around her neck and cheeks.

The newly laid lawn was doing well. She liked its ruffled and slightly unkempt look, with the pink and purple wildlife flowers springing out of the borders, but it wasn’t yet the enchanted nirvana she had had in mind. About a month before, she planted a tiny pair of ivy shoots, which were of course still in their infancy. As with her two youngsters, the miniature black green foliage would require nurturing hands to train them. For the ivy, towards disguising the expanse of standard issue dusty apricot colored bricks. For her two teenage charges, guidance through faith, in contemplation of their escape up and over the wall, from the potential ravages, the possible abyss of inner city strife.

Autumn was beginning its customary transformation. A handful of leaves shed from next door’s oak tree lay dotted over the lawn, like fallen stars of yellow and orange ochre. In her own vegetable patch, there remained one row of lettuce, the rumpled green of butter head at the front, receding to an auburn flamed mix of oak leaf. They sat proudly, between a tepee of bare bamboo where a sprinkling of pea pods had been plucked and eaten raw over the July to August months, and a wash of spinach that still ran wild, hogging the bed. The strawberry plants had produced the welcome surprise of a ripe red berry every now and then. Marsha had harvested it with excited relish, cutting it into equal thirds for the three of them. Through a veil of mild teenage nihilism, Rodney and Patrice partook in their mother’s good life intentions. They guessed she was also making a point, given that such seemingly random gestures were typical of her.

The itch and irritation in Marsha’s swollen foot was like ground pepper seed beneath the dark cinnamon skin of her instep. It mounded, uncomfortable and pushing against the tightening edges of her tartan plimsolls, her feet were slightly hooded by the dark blue of her loose denim jeans. The paving stones were cracked in places, uneven and jutting upwards at the kerb with thick spaced out gaps. The black burnished iron of a stopcock cover formed a dip in the grey granite ground. She skipped over it, wondering when they might come along and inconvenience the residents and road users of Morpeth Way with a New Pavements Project. She was sure it would be gladly tolerated if it meant there would be a decent walkway. Perhaps one where people didn’t feel so compelled to discard fried chicken boxes, fish and chip papers, and the pint glasses that they had stumbled out of the pub at the end of the road with, dumping them half-filled or empty.

The flat was just a few hundred yards away as she passed beneath a canopy of young silver birch trees. The pavement was heavily soiled with ingested berry bird droppings, dark purple splashes, and grey around the edges. As she crossed the road and passed the St Matthews Methodist Church, she thought about how rain would inevitably pour, and wash away the unsightly bird foul. The perfectly balanced nature of things would take care of it. The change of season, the weather, the sunshine, early morning dew, twilight lit evenings, starry darkness, all the elements that make up the atmosphere flitted through her mind. Despite the sting in her step, she felt a warmth in her chest as a tremor ran down through her shoulders. Suddenly it all made sense. The grace between bitter and sweet, beauty and beast, cosmic and concrete. The matter of taking cues from the universe. When the body is unwashed, weary and in need of replenishment it is bathed. And when the sins of the father prey upon the children, they are baptized.