The end of innocence, and other February stories
The first story.
We are all four of us sitting on the floor in the children’s bedroom, reading stories before lights’ out. The book prompts discussion about growing up, and I half-joke to the children, “Never grow up. Always be my babies.” Seven-year-old Scout giggles, and strikes a pose: “I’m already 18 Mummy, I’m about to move out.”
“Oh no!” I mock-wail. “You are breaking my heart!”
Little Ralph, who is six, wriggles onto my lap with a smile. “Don’t worry Mummy, I will never leave you,” he promises, and as I say “Thank goodness!” he throws himself into my arms in a big, hearty bear-hug.
There is a lovely beat of a second or two - Scout and her Dad still laughing, Ralph in my arms - and then I begin to feel him cry. At first I think he is joking but, as the crying melts into sobs and wet tears soak my shoulder, we all realise there is something very wrong.
Ralph can’t find the words for a long time. The sobbing shakes his whole body and I hold him, and kiss him, and smooth his curls back from his wet cheeks.
Later, we realise what it all meant. This was the moment - the exact moment - of his childhood in which he first realised it wouldn’t be the four of us, together forever.
This changes everything. It is the beginning of the end of innocence.
* * * * *
The second story.
I am dead-heading roses before the freshness of the morning gives way to more of this thing we call summer. The little garden is coming back from weeks of severe heat, red rain (rain bringing down red dust from drought-fuelled dust-storms and ongoing bushfires) and heavy winds. The whole garden is somewhat the worse for wear, but beginning to rally.
All four eggs in the blackbird nest have hatched. For weeks, we watch mother and father adjust to new parenthood, racing around the garden seeking food while their babies eat, sleep and cry on steady rotation. The familiarity is not lost on me. We are not so different, the blackbirds and me.
And now as I lop finished blooms from around the deserted nest, I cast an eye over some of the newer roses I planted in spring. They are all-but bare, leaves burned to dust in the intense heat of last week, but Mother Nature never ceases to amaze me. Bending closer, I can see the swellings of green and red buds up and down the branches. Everything begins again.
The air in the garden is thick with happy bees. Forager-bees hurry in and out of flowers that have somehow survived the heat, joyful in the cool of this morning. For breakfast today, nectar of rose, gaura, cosmos, Queen Anne’s lace, clematis, marigold, hydrangea, salvia, valerian, bergamot and stock.
The choir of their hum forms the exact G-chord of the opening bars of John Denver singing Annie’s Song, so uncanny that I glance around, thinking my childhood guitar teacher must be somewhere nearby, about to tell me to practise more.
* * * * *
The third story.
The story begins two years in the past. I am on a coaching call, via Skype, with a lovely Romanian woman called Ana Maria. We are discussing her desire to learn to draw, to find more time for creativity, and her thoughts and fears about the possibility of starting a family. Mid sentence she stops, and I hear her exclaim a delighted “Oh!” across all the oceans that divide us. She announces, “I just found a four-leaf clover!”
(I have never found a four-leaf clover. I used to hunt for them all the time, as a teenager, but never had any success.)
Two years later, last week to be precise, I check my post office box and there, amid bills, bank statements and a 'food ideas' magazine I’m pretty sure I never subscribed to, is a fat envelope, slightly battered and bruised from its journey across continents, covered in Romanian stamps. Inside it is a collection of vintage stationery, pressed leaves, book pages, tea-bags, an old English-Romanian dictionary, antique lace, a sweet letter… and a pressed four-leaf clover.
It is the very four-leaf clover that Ana Maria had found during our conversation, two years earlier. I guess it brought her luck, because that family she talked about starting? Her little boy recently turned one.
