I got excited last week when I looked out the window and saw so many buds on the trees. And I got angry when I noticed ivy on my favourite little ash tree. Because I don’t like ivy.
When I was young, there were lots of derelict houses in the countryside whose inhabitants had long ago dissolved into the air, abandoning their homes to the ivy that choked the decaying walls. The old broken-down gables would sometimes fall from the weight of ivy.
And my uncle Oliver detested ivy almost as much as he detested starlings. One day I was eating a little currant bun in his kitchen when he invited me to help him pull ivy from the trees outside. When I tried to loosen the creeper, I was astonished at how difficult a task it was.
My uncle looked angry. “It’s choking the tree,” he declared.
So I’ve been an enemy of ivy all my life, and last week I was determined to clean up the garden.
I went to Woodies to purchase a strong secateurs for the job, and as I walked across the car park I noticed a friend parking her beautiful white Hyundai close by. She opened the window and we exchanged a few words about the good day. “You’re blossoming,” I declared as I gazed into her eyes.
I wondered would she join me for a coffee, but she said she was rushing to collect her daughter, who had just finished her French orals. My own daughter is grown up now, and I felt a bit empty for a moment.
I decided to head for the bakery and treat myself to coffee and a “curney bun”.
Currant affairs
I love currants and raisins. A few years ago I met a woman who nursed me as a child. I was having lunch in a hotel when she appeared at my table.
“You don’t know me,” she said, “but when I was a teenager I worked for your mother and I nursed you when you were a baby.”
“Was I a good baby?” I wondered.
“You were an angel, except that you cried at night and I’d go to the cot with a bit of currant bread. And that always silenced you.”
So I must have loved currants even then, I thought, and here I am at 60 and I still can’t resist anything with a dried grape in it. Apple pies, bread puddings, even pain-au-raisin – all invite me to gorge compulsively.
But the bakery didn’t have currant scones and I settled for a blueberry muffin, which is not quite the same thing. A blueberry muffin is a gooey chew, and not as firm as the humble scone. The emptiness returned.
At another table, a baby was nursing at a woman’s breast as she and her partner were disputing when to go on holidays.
“September is no good,” she said, “because he’ll be starting creche.”
“Why can’t he miss the first week,” the man protested. “It’s not as if it’s going to damage his chance of a PhD.”
They too left me strangely empty, as if all about me people were blossoming and I was withering. I walked back to the car by way of the river and in the distance I noticed a friend with his dog. He always walks his dog in the evenings, and not many people know that a long time ago he lost a child to cancer. He confided in me once that his son loved small dogs and ever since his son died he has kept a little dog as a kind of remembrance.
Dignified sorrow
I watched him move through the stags and hens gathering in the early evening light outside the Landmark Hotel, with their cigarettes and fleshy thighs, as if he was invisible. I decided not to interrupt his solitude with a superficial greeting. He, too, probably feels empty and withered, I thought, but sorrow has a dignity about it, a private elegance that comes from acknowledging death as part of life.
That evening I intended severing the winding ropes of ivy at the base of the ash tree, but for some reason they didn’t bother me any longer. The ivy was weaving itself around the trunk of the ash with quiet determination, like sinew on dry bone, carrying death to the tree. But the daffodils and cherry blossom and the beginnings of apple buds were all dancing in the breeze, replete with the juices of new life.
Even the ivy itself seemed darkly elegant. Which is when I knew Easter had crept up on me again.