Metamorphosis

Greening.

“When it happens, it’ll happen overnight.”

“Yep, it’ll come for you while you sleep, old age. The clocks will strike midnight, your hair will scroll to silver and your tits will fall into your shoes.”

“One day, you’ll wake up old.”

Sage nodding. Ice baths and HRT. Turmeric. Kefir.

“Fun fact. You’re already in your 40th year, did you know?” That’s my carpenter friend, who (apart from this comment) I really rate. “It’s true. You’re about to enter your forty-first year. Think about it: you turn one after your first year, two after your second year, and so on…”

He’s right, damn him.

Pensive, I climbed into the river this evening to trim my bush.

Minds out the gutter.

We were thinking about moving. It was a proxy for restlessness and the constant need to change it up, make it better.

Spotting when you’re happy is a lost art, don’t you think?

Constant dissatisfaction is lucrative. That is why we are all cultivated to be dissatisfied, all the time.

Knowing when you’re happy is the hardest thing.

I don’t want to move. I love my garden, and the river that may one day inundate my kitchen.¹ I don’t care. It makes me happy every day.

The joy I get from wandering the verges and seeing what’s popping up in the damp ground. Will it be loosestrife, the long spikes of pink so beloved by my neighbourhood bees, or deadly nightshade? I’ve had both.

Today it was raspberries and lamb’s ear. Tomorrow it will be something else.

The garden and the river keep me guessing, for better or worse.

So no, I’m not moving, and yes, I’m still here, plugging away on the book.

It too is probably a proxy, for all the ills that haunt my mind.

Ten days until I hand the manuscript over to my editor.²

Yesterday evening, the garden still wanted attention, intermittent meditation.

“This is where the retaining wall will go.” I chopped loose strands of a sycamore out of the way to show Joel.

“Um babe.”

“It’ll be fine. We won’t cut the roots of any of the vegetation. It’s securing the bank. The trench will go here,” I gestured at the exposed rocks along the river’s edge, “and then the wall will go here.” Up above.

“Babe.”

“You don’t like it? I think it’s a great idea. We can backfill it with soil and plant it so that new growth spills over the wall.”

I can see it in my mind’s eye: a beautiful wall.

It’ll be lovely: really natural, like it’s been here forever.

Like me. A bit weathered but still standing. Propping up that riverbank, like the last desperate vestiges of my youth.

Joel cut me off.

“Jill, for goodness sake, stop. I’m not talking about the wall.”

“What then?”

“That sycamore you just chopped was covered in aphids. There are about fifty thousand of them in your hair.”

Later, I actually felt better about aging.

Like the Green Woman.³

Instead of going grey, I’m going aphid.

1. Very trendy at the moment to love rivers. One of my favourite writers, Robert Macfarlane just released Is a River Alive?, which I wanted to love but … didn’t. Sorry. Since no one asked, here are his books in order of brilliance, according to me. In undisputed first place: Underland, for the Paris catacombs, Slovenian caves, the Mendips, nuclear waste, Swiss cliffs... pure poetry. Then, in joint second place: The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind. All excellent. Is a River Alive? is some way off any of these, I’m afraid. Still worth a read but, if this is your first foray into Macfarlane Land, please pick something else. It’s fine. But not his finest, by some margin.

2. Don’t come knocking. See you on the other side.

3. Courtesy of my mate Helen, this. You know, the Green Woman of Celtic lore, representing creation and resilience? Sounds alright: decade of creation and resilience, come at me.