me. I dump the accumulation of two days’ worth of reasonably healthy living except for the burnt rhubarb cobbler. I whip about smartly to get back to the cottage. No sign of the over-sized compost diners today. Good. Freudian clap-trap notwithstanding, snakes give my heart a quick aerobic workout.
The gardens need some work soon but I can’t get at it today, not with this hot springs article due by four o’clock. The daffodils bob in the small, chilly breezes coming in off the lake. The massed plantings of grape hyacinths look glorious next to the two-tone yellows of the daffy, my early red tulips and the ancient border of purple heather. The blue spruce trees on either side of the long lane leading up to the highway have bright green new needles on the tips of their dark branches. Best of all, the long line of fifty-year-old rhododendrons on the south side of this place look like they’ll be in full bloom in just a week or ten days. Masses of blossoms as big as dinner plates: pale antique orange, bright fuchsia, shell pink, light purple, scarlet red with white centres…
Aunt Ginger, bless her, always had the Rosemont Painters out in the spring for the rhodies and it seems I am expected to keep the tradition going, not that I mind. I use her very best Spode china and I make sure to use No. 1 Ceylon from the trunk she brought back from Sri Lanka on her last world tour. The Painters bring dainty baked specialties to eat so I am let off the hook as far as cooking is concerned. Last year I dressed up in one of Aunt Ginger’s rayon floral dresses and sent the Painters into a major twittering backspin.
“Just then…when you brought out the tea tray...on the porch...the very image!...She wore that exact dress in early spring, if I’m not mistaken...Ginger’s niece, you know, the others all married, I believe...Why, thank you, Mercy, your Aunt Ginger would be pleased that you used her good china for our little group!” and on and on like that. Lovely ladies painting together for over thirty years, twice a month, with a Spring Colours show (I get a special invitation to that because my rhododendrons are the main feature) and a Fall Splendour show at the Rosemont Gallery.
I haven’t bothered hemming her dresses because I wear them just below mid-calf whereas Aunt Ginger, at nearly six feet, strode around like the daughter of the twenties that she was, with her terrific dancer legs and her skirts grazing her muscular knee-caps. I’m almost a foot shorter than she was but we share, unfortunately, the no-nonsense Brown beak and an adventurous streak that made us both unfit for conventional employment or marriage. Still, I wish I’d inherited her legs as well as this schnozz and her beautiful old place.
Not that we’re unsociable or willfully eccentric. We both like parties and travelling and pitching in for community events and assorted good causes. But I absolutely must have peace and quiet, daily hours of solitude, to keep sane, and I think Aunt Ginger must have needed that too. Why else would she have lived alone for over sixty years?
beauty and truth, truth an d beauty,
we believe in these abov e all
Who...? Sadie? Oh, there you are, good girl! Brrr. It’s nippy enough with the winds coming in off the lake. I feel a tad melancholy, this raw spring weather, an assignment I’m sick and tired of rewriting, no slush fund to tap for a quick two-day getaway to a nice little bed and breakfast with a stack of books to read...or, better yet, I could spend the whole day out here in my gumboots, grey sweats and old red Hudson’s Bay coat, grubbing in the good earth. But. No. Mercy Brown has bills to pay and a dog to feed. The day will come when I can putter around in the gardens with not a care in the world except having enough bone meal on hand. Right now “Hot springs of the Pacific Northwest” needs a final edit, a new lead paragraph and cutlines for five photographs.
I clump back up the slate footpath, stop to pick several brown lilac blossoms from the bushes flanking the porch steps and then, I can’t help myself, I have to inspect the roses. Aunt Ginger planted antique shrub roses and climbers along the west side of the cottage. Whenever I open the bedroom windows in summer, the fragrance of the roses overwhelms me. I regularly swoon, all by myself unfortunately, on the king-sized four-poster bed, thanks to Apothecary’s Rose, Cardinal De Richelieu, Duchesse De Montebello and the divine Moonlight.
Last spring, two months after I moved in, my friend Terry went under the knife for breast cancer and a vast network of family and friends is now waiting out the five-year prognosis. Somehow I got it in my head to plant a rose especially for Terry—if a rose could live through five years, then Terry would too. I dislike this quirk I have of attaching omens to things. I try very hard to squelch such mental aberrations but the harder I squelch, the more firmly rooted becomes the silly superstition. So I drove two hundred kilometres to find the antique rose nursery where Aunt Ginger often went, only to discover that the owners had retired. Luckily for me, they still lived next to the nursery. These tiny transplanted Welshmen with their bushy white mops of hair were happy to see me; they had been big fans of Aunt Ginger.
“Smashing woman, knew what she was about...Indeed she did, loved our roses she did...So very sorry, eighty-three was she?...Indeed I am as well, a good age though?”
Then they tottered out to their own garden and came back with a two-year-old Thérèse Bugnet in a large clay pot and wouldn’t hear of my paying for it.
“Think of it as our little commemoration for your auntie. Yes, please do take it, the very least we can do.”
A hybrid rugosa bred in Canada in 1950 with fragrant lilac-pink blooms on a tall and healthy shrub, the first and last to bloom and absolutely untouched by winter.
So reads Ms. Bugnet’s catalogue description, making her entirely apt as a talisman of my hopes for Terry and as a commemoration of Aunt Ginger. I drove back home in the dark, feeling a strange mixture of fondness for my aunt and helpless dread for my friend.
Now, the rose looks awfully stark to me—three small dark brown branches protruding from the mulch with not a leaf in sight. The rest of the roses look much the same. I shouldn’t worry. Last spring, I’d come around the corner after being away for the first two weeks of May, and they were bursting out all over in lime green buds and leaves. They’re probably just being very sensible about fickle April weather. I’m being very
needlessly superstitious in this case
but pay attention to th e other
What? Who’s there? I didn’t hear anybody drive down the lane unless it’s Corey coming by to see if there are any odd jobs to do...“Hello? I’m by the house!”
Huh. Nobody. Weird glitch in my ears. Well, enough of this. It’s very ill-disciplined of me to stand here wishing there was just one late-blooming lilac left for me to sniff. The essence of spring for me—lilacs and the warm sun on my back, clouds of generous, sweet lilacs in every room. I’d meander from vase to bowl, sinking my big, sharp schnozz into white and purple flowerets like an adoring giant, a human bee. Yes!
No. I must get straight to work before I send down roots myself. Lash, lash, back to work, two solid hours, then I play!
Two
This, then, makes life worth living. The late afternoon sun shines onto the deck where I’m protected from the lake winds, nestled in my old down mummy bag on a wicker chaise lounge. Beside me, a pot of Earl Grey tea and a tray of arrowroot biscuits, a little stale, it’s true, but just fine for dunking.
If someone were to come around the corner, I’m sure I’d look like a contented green larva wearing a beret and sunglasses. The sun won’t last much longer but the hot springs assignment is out of my hair so I can finally relax. It’s too early to panic about where my next paycheque is coming from. I’ve learned
