My Father has had a hard life. He’s getting old now and age is bearing down.
These days he enjoys simply sitting in our garden watching the children swing and slide and dig and run making the happy sounds that children do. Somehow children always seem to bring a gift of carefree joy to the deep rooted seat of age.
As shadows lengthen and daylight dilutes into sepia, he can still find a quiet spot in a garden to think, murmur on politics, philosophy or random ideas. Occasionally giving advice on which plants would suit the soil conditions best. Last year it was peas and runner beans, they add a lot of nitrogen to the ground apparently.
My father has always been the kind of person you would remember. He is one of life's eccentrics.
But now old age and a weary body take his footsteps along a quieter route, slower, simpler, treading a pace that can't be forced.
And it is a change of season for my Dad, who like a sailor has had a life of extreme weather conditions. He is used to the challenge of the sea!
In his day, he could claim a mountain in a morning, but now the slow, aching, walk upstairs overwhelms.
He lived for some years in the deserts of North Africa learning how to understand the extremes of both the sun and the storm.
Here, beside the window and the potted plants and the dried flowers threaded with spiderwebs on the sill, life seems to have reached a plateau and it is the hardest yet to acclimatise to.
Still a little abandoned corner of life soil, often left neglected and unnoticed. A place to pile uprooted weeds and fallen leaves....
Now sprouts green. And where tear sodden earth was trod underfoot....
Flowers now grow at his feet.
Four small girls blossoming abundant. An unlikely adventure, but maybe the best yet.
Straining tendril from dehydrated earth to quenching light.
My Dad was a horticulturalist, (maybe that explains all these garden metaphors:)
He had a very messy greenhouse, pots everywhere, and a very messy garden too, full of over zealous jungle like plants.
It was not much of an advert for his business , but it’s the way he liked it.
The greatest peace I’ve seen him have is in nature. Times when we walked the dogs and stumbled upon some secret, undiscovered woodland, and he would just look around and pick out the names of the wildflowers in Latin. Or in the garden with a fork digging out potatoes, staring up at the sky for long stretches in-between, hands resting on the wooden handle, boots deep in trenched earth.
Or watching sea birds catch fish along the coast with an ancient pair of binoculars in hand and silence as a companion.
In my mind the muddy boots of hard times stay at the door. Only flowers will grow in the soil of my memories of him.
One of the greatest gifts my Dad has passed on to me is the connection between God and nature. It is something that has made a deep impression on me, like a footprint in the clay of my heart.
Whenever anyone asked him what he did for a living, he would reply, "
I paint with a spade"
We used to make fun of "his art" by saying that it must be of the abstract variety.
But growing tender plants in the greenhouse, exploring nature's heights and depths or uttering a quiet prayer in the silence of a church, were all an embracing of God for him.When I think of my father I see stormy, grey skies falling head over heels across ragged fields of grass. Potatoes cooking in the embers and tasting wonderfully of like mud and charcoal. The chink of a September sun glinting on the sharp edge of blue tide in the distance. Pheasants and hares hanging in the garage door, homemade scrumpy and apple cores in the compost.
Scraping lichen and moss from grey granite....
"
These rocks have been here for a million and more years and they'll be around for a million more after we're all long gone."
A well worn expression (one of my Dad's many) 'oft' used in times of reflection.
Always made me feel infinitely small and grounded and afraid and secure all at the same time.
Truly, we can't build anything physically eternal, in this life. Time will fray and unravel the loose strands of our creations one day. But in nature we can always sense the eternal essence of our creator.
He holds the fabric of our lives in his hands. However torn or frayed or mismatched the pieces are He weaves them in to a new garment.
Bodies age and deteriorate, but my Dad's soul somehow stands as an oak set against the setting sun.
Or a sea bird hovering over the granite tides.
Regardless of the toll time takes on tired bones and the memory dug-well of a life lived to the brim...
yet somehow only just truly savoured.It will stand
a little quieter, a little softer a little truer. Weathered maybe, but accepting of the seasons. Both the winter frost and the sunlight of summer.
Reaching only further and higher as the days pass.Tuesdays Unwrapped at "
Chatting at the Sky"
