Today is a strange day for me.

My grandma, who is recovering in hospital from a serious fall, has just had another this morning.

Her life seems to be closing in around her, until she can’t escape the hospital, which she loathes, because she is trapped inside her failing body, which is brittle with age.

It makes me think of my other grandma, whom I called Nanna. She died over a decade ago, but she was still riding her stationary bike in front of the TV soaps up until the day she had a heart attack.

Both woman are so strong, even now that one is fading and the other is gone.

When I think of women speaking out, of self-discipline, of sacrifice, of pure goodness and spirituality, they gather close, as if they are within arm’s reach.

So on this strange day, I want to share a part of them.

In it is a poem from one of my university text books, but I barely looked at until my Nanna recited it to me only a year before her death.

When she said it, it became as tangible as a prayer and though my memory is a poor and abused thing, I knew it immediately and never forgot a word.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

WB Yeats, “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”

It is Spring in the Southern Hemisphere and time to think of cleaning house… but let’s first take a wander in my garden.

• My garden is an oasis.
• It is one of a kind.
• It is my attempt to let the wild things have their way in the most manicured suburb in the city.

These are all excuses.

In reality it is a mess.

My garden does as it pleases, without any human intervention.

There is evidence of human intrusion however –

• the sandstone pots full of forgotten soil
• the hose nesting amongst the weeds
• a scattering of deflated balls that have been kicked over the fence and left to their own devices

– but they are no competition to the sheer power of Mother Nature.

Spring Has Sprung

My garden has four precise seasons:

1. In Summer it is crispy.
2. In Autumn it is defeated.
3. In Winter it is soggy.
4. But in Spring it is perfection.

This is not because I get a burst of inspiration in Spring and whip it into shape.

In Spring it still draws collective gasps of horror from gardener friends, but in Spring it has a redeeming feature:

In Spring the cherry blossom bursts into life.

Fear of Death

As a child, I often had sleepless nights lying in bed, almost crippled by a fear of death. I think what I was most afraid of was the unknown, because I have been blessed to reach my thirties largely untouched by the loss of loved ones.

But I still remember the fear. It wore a face in the dark and was even there when I closed my eyes.

I would lie in bed, my toes touched by ice, praying that I could stop thinking its presence into my room.

But as soon as I thought of death I thought of life and then there would be a kaleidoscope of faces – all the people I loved and feared to lose the most.

The only thing for it was to sit at the foot of my parents’ bed in the dark and listen to their breathing!

Accepting the Cycle

I still have moments where the spectre of death visits me.

But as an adult its presence only seems to sharpen my resolve to focus on what I love most in this life. There are lots of wonderful little things that go unnoticed, lost in the tangle of everyday busyness, but a visit from my old fear helps separate them from the darkness.

Similarly, in a garden that is perpetually uninviting, the cherry blossom’s arrival is a beacon. To me it is like the ring of silver horns.

Yet the cherry blossom is a short-lived visitor, barely an echo on the wind.

It seems that as soon as it has bloomed, it is already returning to the earth…

But for those weeks that it is in its fully glory, my disaster of a garden fades into the background. As the seasons cycle on and the tree is once again a pile of sticks, I take pleasure in knowing that the blossoms will be back.

And with its passing it takes me back to another childhood experience, when I first fell under the sway of wonderful poetry.

And though Frost’s poem on first reading invited death back into my consciousness, as I read it again and again, I realised that it was important not to get lost in one’s fears or to focus on the brevity of this life, but to keep your eye on the window and await the cherry blossom.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Robert Frost