Month: August 2020

Mowing the Lawn

I stood on the back deck with a comforting mug of coffee in the hand. It was still early morning and everything was draped in a soft pink light. The grass was long and heavy with the weight of the dew. The sun refracted miniature rainbows through the drops on the leaves. A thin mist was hanging over the lawn as the rising sun started to boil off the dew. As I finished my coffee the grass started to stand up proud as the weight of the dew was removed.

I fetched the green reel mower from the storage shed and prepared myself mentally for the coming suppression of the abundance of suburban wilderness. The mower was a mechanical model and I knew the thick grass was going to give me a good workout. Fortunately the lawn was small enough for the mower and anyway, it was worth all the trouble to see the admiring glances from the neighbours when they watch me whisk it over the front lawn.

I started the backyard mowing where the lawn met the small vegetable patch. The vegetable patch had shrunk to that miniature size over the previous years because it had been difficult for the two of us to eat our way through the harvests. I saw that some tomatoes were ready for the picking and you took one to nibble on as I curved around to the peonies. They looked very droopy but maybe that was because of the overnight dew. I made a mental note to check on them later in the day when it was warmer.

I carefully followed the edge of the lawn and stopped at the bed with the pink Rosa Rugosa bushes. A long shoot was hanging over the edge and the dense layer of thorns made for an obstacle that cried out for human intervention.  After tying the offending appendage back to the central stake I continued on my way past the gazebo in the rear corner of the yard.

I was very proud of the gazebo because I had built it myself over the old fish pond where I dumped the bricks from the wall I had demolished. I couldn’t see either the pond or the bricks under the wooden floor but future archaeologists were sure to have many theories about the buried wall in a backyard garden.

Just past the pear tree I could see where I had started the circuit and I decided to take a break under its cool shadows. I leaned back against the gnarled trunk and looked at the lawn edged by a nice wide strip of mowed grass. I remembered with guilt how often I had thought of replacing my trusted mower. As long as it was clean and sharp it could still make a great cut. I got up before the slow stupor could overtake me completely and prepared my steed for more action.

I started the new circuit just inside of edge I made previously, flattening out the curves as I go so that after the following circuit I would have a perfect rectangle left. The sweet smell of cut grass wafted up from the strip next to me and that took me back to when I was a child and I could roll around the thick grass without worrying about enforcing any order on it.

In a sudden streak of rebellion I cut across the middle of the lawn to clear a strip diagonally to the other side. My outburst spent, I took a few minutes to clear the long grass from the one triangle that my youthful activism created. By then I started to get tired but I persevered and finished the final piece of the lawn.

The back deck made a perfect perch from where to look over the expanse of freshly cut grass that I had brought under my control. Although it offended my mathematical senses I had to agree that you couldn’t see any difference between mowing between the lines, or outside of them, or even across them; the end result was the same, and still very satisfying.

The Elephant

The relentless African sun covered the bare hills and empty gullies of the Serengeti plains with heat like a horse blanket. All along the floor of the gully the last vestige of water still showed its mark by the cracks in the smooth mud that had been hardened by the merciless sun. An Umbrella Thorn tree stood on a little rise. It used to be a magnificent member of its species with green, succulent leaves at the end of the highest branches where it would provide food for the giraffes and welcome shade to everything else but even it was suffering in the heat with brown and listless leaves.

An elephant bull stood under the tree, its body heaving up and down with every breath. Its thick skin was an unnatural light grey colour with flecks of red to show that he had tried to protect himself with a layer of dust but even that did not help much.  He used to be able to bear his majestic tusks high with regal arrogance but now they seemed to weigh too much for his tired neck.  His hind legs started to buckle followed shortly by his front legs.  He tried to raise his trunk in a silent sign of defiance but he could not get more than a small quiver out of the appendage.  His head settled slowly on his front legs and his eyes closed in resignation. The bull lay perfectly still.

A slight breeze sprang up out of the east and stirred the fine hairs on the tip of its tail. As the wind picked up a bit more the bull slowly opened his eyes and started to move his big hulk. He slowly and with great effort rose to his feet and turned to face into the wind, which was quite refreshing by then.

On the eastern horizon, he could see a small cloud and even as he watched it, the cloud grew bigger and bigger, and started moving towards him. He stood watching the rolling cloud with the wind in his face.  With his ears spread out wide he was cooling down quite fast and he felt a new sense of energy building up inside him. The spreading cloud reached the zenith and a big drop of water struck him on the shoulder. Despite the fact that he was waiting for it, it still startled him. Soon the water was carving black rivulets through the dust on his broad back and water started gathering around his feet. He lifted his trunk to suck moisture out of the sky.

A lightning bolt cleaved the sky from the zenith to the horizon accompanied by a mighty clap of thunder. The elephant watched as the water started running down the gully and soon it reached the bottom of the hill. The wind picked up more speed and started whipping the tree around. The water ran down hill in a brown torrent and the elephant could see twigs and branches swept down by the stream.

After a little while, the dark clouds started to lift off the horizon and soon the sun could be seen peeking out from behind them. By then the downpour had started to let up and soon only a few heavy drops showed that there had been activity from the sky. The elephant stood tall and regal with his trunk raised into the sky as if to thank the divine spirits for the gift of water they had bestowed on the land. He ended with a mighty trumpet and started towards the north to find himself a mate.

Stranger in a Strange Land

The road was like an arrow pointing straight ahead to a small cluster of puffy clouds on the far horizon. A little Khoisan boy stood next to the road, looking at me with his serious eyes and round belly. I could only see thorny desert shrubs for miles around and I couldn’t image where that kid lived or where he could have found food to feed his obviously healthy stomach. It was the middle of the day and even the crickets had stopped their persistent screeching that, according to what an old man told me, could drive a man crazy.

The pulsating heat finally drove me back into the cool interior of the 4×4 Land Rover. The boy disappeared into the distance in my rear view mirror and I started to study the road ahead with more intensity. The scattered “koppies” belied the otherwise flat terrain in the part of the Kalahari I was travelling through. In the shimmering distance I saw the distinctive shapes of a small cluster of umbrella thorn trees. I had seen giraffes munching on the very tops of these trees in the Kruger National Park but that was many miles towards the east and out here I couldn’t see any wild life except for a buzzard circling off in the distance.

The contrast between the hardscrabble desert and my own Canadian province couldn’t have been more severe. Back home you were never far from a forest of majestic trees towering over you, blocking out the sun and providing cool shadows all around. And also blocking your view, I reminded myself. Forcing you to see further in your mind’s eye than what the real world allowed you to; forcing you to use your imagination more than your eyes. Out there in the Kalahari I found wide open spaces and a sky that stretched from one side of the horizon to the other with unrelenting azure blue. The expansive emptiness redefined your own preconceived notions about time and space and your position in it.

I drove under a blanket of flat-bottomed cumulus clouds that stretched to the cleft made by two intersecting hillocks that seemed to squeeze the road between them. I felt my breath slow down to a crawl and my throat opened up to pull in a full measure of air. Ever since leaving Upington on the way north to the Kgalagadi Park that straddled South Africa and Botswana I had felt myself relax, my shoulders lost their stiffness and the knot in my stomach unwound. All thoughts and anxieties escaped through my relaxed throat and disappeared into the vastness that surrounded me.

The road started to wind its way along the border, South Africa to the left and Botswana to the right. It was impossible to see a difference between the two countries. Both sides of the border had barren patches of red sand that were broken by green tufts growing in the meagre shades of crooked little thorny shrubs. The definitive border line on my map was a much stronger indication of men’s organization of themselves than what the desert around me apparently cared about. At least they could put their nationalistic endeavours aside long enough to create the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park.

By then it was late afternoon and my GPS confirmed what the road signs had been warning me about, namely that the road is coming to an end. I looked forward with rising anticipation to the end of my road trip and the time I could spend visiting the park and enjoying the peace and quiet of a wilderness experience.  

I stopped where the road ended, right at the entrance to the park.

Various bags with different colored liquids covered the stand next to my bed and turned it into a primeval forest. Each bag sprouted a root of translucent plastic, which ended in a contraption that would put the best engineering efforts to shame. From there a single tube ran into the needle permanently imbedded in my arm. I loved to watch the light playing on the opposite wall when the sun refracted through the colorful leaves of my high-tech tree.

I was the cranky patient in room 27-C that all the nurses avoided like the plague but, since hospital policy required that I be attended to, they sent me Nurse Laura. She had a strong, sturdy build and the tight golden curls reigned over her colorful hospital scrubs. Poor kid had just finished university and she was still bright and cheery with a friendly chatter and warm smiles, even for a cantankerous old man dying of cancer.

She came in with a new bag for my tree and proceeded to fix it in place with its own tube joining the others in the concentrator. She had a small frown between her eyes and I saw a pink tongue sticking out coyly as she concentrated on the task. She had not learned yet how to appear to know everything, to have seen everything, and to be an expert in everything. She explained to me that the doctor had decided, as a special favor, to allow me to have a morphine drip permanently attached so that I can take the painkiller whenever I needed it. Something to do with “late stage cancer”, she explained.

 “Don’t open it too much,” she explained as she showed me how to control the flow with the little thumb wheel, “we don’t want you to become addicted now, do we?”  I was about to tell her that I didn’t have enough time left to get addicted to morphine but her serious demeanor made me swallow my words. She reminded me too much of my daughter.

I had never had a daughter, but I still saw her in my dreams quite frequently. She was about four years old with a sturdy build and a blonde mop of curly hair. Although she was tall for her age, she still had to crane her neck skywards to look me in the eyes six feet off the ground. The freckles and twinkling eyes would put a lie to the serious expression that she would habitually wear. Only those that she felt most comfortable and safe with would ever get the chance to see the vibrant and cheerful side of her character, and then only infrequently.

The cancer wrapped itself around my bowls like a snake. It normally just laid there like a weight, just heavy enough to ensure I never forgot it, and big enough so that my whole abdomen felt full and solid. I could never understand those people that felt they had to take ownership of their illnesses or hardships. It was always “my headache”, or “my ulcer”, or “my doctor”; it seemed like an obscene indulgence to be so self-absorbed and constantly gazing at your navel. Now that I had my own demon, however, it changed everything. I even had a name for it. I called my cancer Big C. Mister Big C, to acknowledge the devastating power it had assumed over my body.

I felt Mister Big C starting to move. Like a snake, he started to stretch himself this way, and to tighten his grip that way. The pain grew in my bowls and started to raise its head. I turned the little control wheel that I had been playing with to open it up a bit. I left it at about one drop every five seconds as Nurse Laura had instructed me.  After a while, the pain settled back down and Mister Big C started to relax and to loosen its grip on my bowls.

When I woke up the sun was shining through the window and Nurse Laura was straightening the bedding out. She gave me a sad hello smile and continued with her work. I decided to enjoy the day and ignored the drumming in my head that felt like a rumbling just beneath the very surface of my consciousness.

“You look sad this morning,” I told Laura, “what’s going on?”

She did not answer but glanced in the direction of the chart hanging off the end of my bed. The chart contained every single medical mystery about my condition; medication, tests, observations, and lord knew what else. The doctor kept his face nonchalantly blank while looking at the chart or updating it with more spidery scribbles. Laura, on the other hand, had not yet learned to wear her professional face at work. Her face got longer the longer my chart got. When Laura glanced at the chart, her face was long and sad. It did not bode well for my health.

The drumming picked up some speed but luckily, Mister Big C seemed fast asleep. No doubt, he was still feeling the effect of my nightcap from the night before. The flowers in my window were doing very badly so Laura left with them to fix them somehow, I hoped. I loved flowers and having them in my windows was important, but only as long as they looked good.

I lay flat on my back staring at the ceiling. It was smooth and painted white without a single mark in site. I played an old game of mine, imaging myself shrinking down further and further until I was smaller than an atom. In that state, I could get right into the ceiling and travel around its atoms to study them in detail. The drumming called me back to reality. It had assumed its normal level of cacophony and the dancers were in place doing their stuff. It was time for things to get back to normal and for the mind games to end.

Laura came in with a fresh vase and a new flower for my window. “You have a visitor,” she said and stood aside to make way for Pastor Jensen to come in.

When I came to the hospital, they asked me which religion I wanted to have on my registration card. I was afraid they were going to send me a chaplain so I wrote down Unitarianism as my religion, since I was convinced there would be no pastor for such a religion in our region of the country. They found me Pastor Jensen instead. He was quite happy to visit anybody in the hospital, even if it was one of the lost sheep.

Pastor Jensen had been visiting me regularly twice a week for some time and I could tell that he had been working his way through one of his comforting books. Every visit lasted exactly one hour and he sounded like he was repeating the daily devotionals from memory. He must have run out of devotionals since he had less and less to say with every visit. That day he was especially quiet with a painful look on his face.

I started telling him about my daughter.  Pastor Jensen started paging furiously through his notebook. I enjoyed the look of confused panic on his face when he could not find any reference to a daughter. He lifted a fat fountain pen out of his pocket and, with a deft twist of the cap, exposed the golden nib to the late afternoon light. I watched the graceful movement of his wrist as he started making new notes in his book. He seemed relieved when I asked him to cut his visit short because I was getting very tired.

Nurse Laura came in and fluffed up the pillows. She adjusted the bed so that I could sit upright and pulled the cart with supper closer. I had trouble controlling the spoon so she took it and started feeding the thin porridge to me. It was not much but that was all my body could still tolerate.

“This gruel will kill me,” I told her. “I want you to get me a thick steak covered in mushroom sauce, or a smoked country sausage with mashed potatoes and sauerkraut!” She just clucked her tongue at me while wiping some spill from my chin.

On the way out, she left me with a courageous smile that could not quite reach her eyes.

I lay back and watched the stars through my window. Orion drifted into view, leading with that mighty searchlight on his shoulder. Orion; called the mighty warrior, the cunning hunter, the lord of the sky. I hoped he could go down in glorious flames, letting go of life with a thunderous roar, a glorious end to a glorious life, instead of being babied in his final days by young women with smooth skins and sadness in their eyes.

The pain started to spread up into my bowls and the contractions gripped my stomach with a steely fist.  I groped the control of the morphine drip and started playing with it. I turned the little wheel and counted the rate as about one every five seconds. The pain continued to spread and I felt bile rising in my throat.

I opened the control a bit more, and then more again.

Through the window, Orion slowly started to spin like a Ferris wheel. A cascade of stars spun round and round and then started leaking out the edges and fell to the earth. The last one left was the fiery Betelgeuse that slowly expanded until the red eye seemed to fill the whole sky. I felt the eye staring intently into my eyes as if it could see the smoke-filled cavern in my head where wild figures were dancing ancient gyrations to the beat of incessant drumming. After a while, the eye faded into darkness and I could hear a lone Canada goose belatedly honking towards the south.

Laura Anderson stood at the entrance to the private room. Her hands covered her mouth and mournful tears clung to her cheeks. A grizzled old man lay in the bed. His body looked like it had deflated and his skin stretched tight over his bones. A wonderful smile softened the stubble on his cheeks.

He carefully took the crucible out of the oven with the long tongs. The ceramic container shimmered with heat as he transferred it to the stone bench.  The color changed slowly through orange and then dull red until it was completely cooled down.  He got up slowly and painfully and bent over the pot.  His heart skipped a beat and his breath became fast and shallow. A small glimmering red stone lay in the bottom. He finally did it! The philosopher’s stone!

The flickering lamp didn’t do much to dispel the dark corners of his cell. The old oak door was in the darkest corner of the room and against the opposite wall his sleeping mat was rolled up, ready to be put out for the night.  He sat on his stool looking out the high window at the few stars visible from his position. He was deep in thought and didn’t even feel the cold that numbed his fingers and face.

Dear lord, how long did it take him, how many failures and disappointments, how many sleepless nights did he have to endure? That night he had reached the rubedo for the first time, proof that he completed the final step in the magnum opus successfully. He put the stone in a mortar and started crushing it with his pestle. Slowly he reduced it to a fine dull red powder. He added the powder to a glass bowl filled with aqua vitae. He held the bowl up to the feeble lamp and saw the deep red color like an old wine. The elixir of life!

He felt the customary cramping in his guts. Brother Magnus, the apothecary, had warned him about his condition. “You’re sitting in your cell with your evil vapors from your fires and your pots. You need to get out and get fresh air. The mercury will kill you.”

Earlier that day he went back to the good brother for more herbs to treat his pitiless guts but Magnus told him that he couldn’t do anything more for him. “The mercury has finally done you in,” he said. “Only one thing can save you now, the elixir of life. Without it you won’t live to see tomorrow.”

He took up the glass bowl again and swirled it around.  The elixir of life! How ironic. He could drink it and be healed or use it to turn the platter of mercury into gold. His feverish eyes burned as he stared deep into the liquid, looking for an answer to the age old question: health or wealth? But no, he had worked on this for too long, he had to have the gold! He carefully dripped the elixir onto the mercury until it was all gone.

The rising sun finally shone through the high window and reflected off the platter with its new golden sheen. The old man lay curled up on the floor with the finality of death on his face.

The hunter crouched low behind the outcrop and watched the grazing ibex. His strong fingers curled around the rock in his hand and his bowed legs were tense, ready to hurl him out of concealment and on to the white animal with its curved horns. The ibex lowered his head and reached for the green tuft at the base of the outcrop. Aurc uncoiled his strong legs and with a mighty shove jumped towards the animal, the rock raised for the brutal blow. At the same moment the ledge under his right foot gave way and with a sickening lurch he fell backwards over the cliff. His descent ended thirty feet down the rock face where he uprooted a small pine tree before coming to a crunching halt. The ibex disappeared up the steep ravine.

The sun was already high when his eyes opened. The first thing he saw was the seabirds wheeling around the sky, looking for the shellfish on the glistening beach sand; then he saw his leg. Twisted and mangled with a white bone sticking through the skin.  He carefully shifted into a sitting position and grunted with pain as he straightened out the leg as well as he could. He took the tunic off his broad hairy shoulders and tore a strip of skin off it. He used a stick as a splint and tied it to his broken leg. His mate would have done a much better job. She had patient fingers and her soft cooing voice would help soothe the sharp pain away, but she was no more and he simply had to do this himself. Using the uprooted little tree as a support he started hobbling back to their cave further along the beach.

By the time he got to the final rise leading to the cave the sweat was pouring off his sloping forehead and was dripping from his thick brows. He heaved himself onto the ledge in front of the cave and sat down with his back against the cool rock. The right side of his body felt like it was on fire and he knew he had to hurry to finish his last act, but first he needed to rest.

After a while he took a piece from the fire that always burned at the entrance and crawled into the far back corner, past his bedding and the heap of spent shells. In the flickering light he looked at the skeleton wrapped in skin, her head resting on a soft pillow of grass. He stroked the covers softly and made some endearing sounds. His mate was the last of his kind he had seen in many moons. When she passed he had put her in the in the rear corner so that she could be with the tribe. The yellow buttercup flowers he had left on her wide forehead were wilted so he took them off and flicked the dust away.

He touched the fire to a heap of dried leaves and twigs that he had prepared previously. As the fire flared up he could see the sloping wall next to his mate was covered in lines and marks.  He carefully warmed the fat in the hollowed stone basin and mixed some of the red powder into it. There was only a little left but he knew it didn’t matter. This would be his last painting.

He chewed the tip of a twig to make it soft and then dipped it in the bowl of red ochre. He chose an empty spot close to his sitting height and started drawing the hunting scene on the wall. First the ibex, tall and proud, with horns curving all the way back to its shoulders. He should really have used white for the ibex but he didn’t have the time to grind the shells into a white powder. Next he drew the hunter with a few straight lines, his raised arm ended right at a little hump on the wall. He liked the effect and decided not to draw the rock in his hand. He sat back and looked at the result. He grunted satisfaction to his mate but she was mute.

By the time he got back to the entrance the sun was setting across the bay. He sat down next to the fire with his legs straight in front of him. His thick neck muscles relaxed and his big head leaned back against the wall. His breathing was fast and shallow as the searing pain spread across his body. He tried to stop himself from simpering but was not successful. It didn’t matter any way; his voice was the only sound he heard as he watched the night moving in. He closed his eye against the swirling smoke and remembered.

He remembered when he was part of a tribe. They had been living in these caves for many cycles of the sun, hunting the ibex and collecting the shellfish. He remembered the name giving ceremony where the wizened old mother of the tribe named him Aurc, Aurc of the Ibex. She spoke over him with the grunts she did so well, but mostly with her hands. He remembered when he met Lela from the neighboring tribe for the first time; their coming together and their tribes celebrating with fire and stomping.

The smoke filled his wide nostrils but couldn’t drive out the sweet smell of dying meat that came from his leg.

He remembered when the seasons started to change. The snow and ice retreated and the sun shone hotter.  It became more difficult to find water and food was scarce as well. The old tribe members were dying away faster and no new babies came to replace them.  Slowly they became fewer and fewer until only he and Lela were left.  Now she was resting under the wall with paintings and he slowly slid sideways to lie flat on the ground with the smoke covering him like a skin.