Gimme Mo on Vacation

Alstroemeria

There will be no edition of Gimme Mo today.

No real writing - just a series of excuses for why I couldn’t get down to serious writing. So you could exit now, if you’re not interested.

Thing is, every time we return to our mountain home, there is one day when I totally fall in love with our hillside, all over again. Today was that day on this trip, a day when you exclaim,

“God’s in His Heaven and all’s right with the world.”

It had rained at night, and when I opened the door to our verandah, the flowers were speckled with dew. I took a couple of photographs of the Lily of the Incas, the Alstroemeria, and sent one to my sister. “This is the mating of a butterfly and a flower”, she gushed.

I stretched on the lawn, my feet cool against the wet grass, and my wife looked out from her study. Later, she told me - You looked like such a sweet little old man. Hmm, not what I was expecting to hear on a day when I thought everything was so right…

I pulled my cycle out of the shed at the back of the house, and worked the rust out of the chain with a spot of WD40. Pity I couldn’t inject that into my knees, I thought later, when I gave up climbing half-way to the top of the hill, and coasted home to the ducks and the flowers, to a cup of coffee while I lolled in the verandah and admired the canopy of trees that shield us from the road.

Above the house, the overflow from a spring had been channelled into two water bodies, and our gardener of twenty-five years guided me around the garden that is emerging from the bogland that we began to tame a couple years ago. It’s been a cool spring, and we greedily miss the apricots that should have been on our table by now, but it’s good to see the trees laden with green fruit, that will hopefully turn a luscious gold in a few days.

The hisalloos are already a ripened gold, though, and as we walked to a wedding celebration in Kaphura village, I stopped to pick the tart little berries from every brambled bush, like a schoolchild in no hurry to get to class.

I’ll write something serious when we get back home, I told myself - about old age, perhaps, a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot. Not inappropriate, as we met old friends at lunch: when we climbed out of Kaphura village and took the forest path home, I realised how much we’ve all slowed. So we stopped to catch our breath, to admire the regreening of the forest above the linesman’s home.

“Let’s not take that path, it will be slippery with pine needles.”

“I’m not so comfortable on a narrow path any longer.”

”Come for chai”, Madhumita said.

And we did, and over chai and biscuits we talked about creaking knees, and “Diffuse cerebral atrophy”, a term I just learned this week, which means nothing more than losing a few million brain cells to the ravages of time, to the years spent on this planet. Madhumita told us how she tries to fend off the demons of old age, and passed around a video of Saurabh Bothra*, whose yoga classes she joins every day, along with some three lakh other women.

“He’s cute”, my wife remarked.

On our way out, we compared walking sticks - mine, which belonged to my father, is beginning to split, so I showed Madhumita how I’m winding copper wire around the wood, now varnished with age, to extend the life of my precious heirloom.

Back in our garden, the azalea buds had closed for the night. They’re looking a little shrivelled, the gardener and I agreed. We weeded the soil below the plant and gave it a quick drink of water.

But the jacaranda had burst forth in the afternoon, the first ever blush of purple on the tree we had planted ten years ago, in memory of an uncle who left too soon.

And the magnolia has flowered too. We walked through the field of daisies to stand beneath the solitary waxy blossom of palest cream, its delicate fragrance wafting around the tree.

So what if our knees are creaking, and I looked like a sweet old man in the first light of the day.

On our hillside, God’s in His Heaven and all’s right with the world.

Next week, Gimme Mo shall be back to “Speak of things that matter, With words that must be said”

(Simon and Garfunkel - The Dangling Conversation)

*https://www.thehindu.com/society/saurabh-bothra-yoga-trainer-entrepreneur-habuild-older-women-community-prioritise-health/article69175430.ece

stretched in the lawn at first light, admired the flowers speckled with dew, then got the rust off my cycle chain with a spot of WD40. That was easy, but getting the rust out of my knees is not going to be as easy - I barely made it half-way up the hill before I chickened out and coasted home to the ducks and the flowers.

getting my legs back over the bar of my mountain bike