Bicycle Days
The morning sun shines in. Joseph slots his jeans and tee-shirt on, draws the yellow curtains, and swoops down the stairs. It is the summer of being sixteen. In the kitchen his father is hunched over the table with a cup of tea. The kitchen blinds are down and the light is on. Joseph opens the blinds and turns off the light. He puts some corn flakes in a bowl, sloshes some milk in and wolfs them down.
His two friends from the Green are outside, he sees them stopping outside the gate, leaning over on their bikes. The Corporation estate houses are on their way going towards the seaside. Joseph grabs a towel and as he goes, his father closes the blinds, turns on the light and hunches over the cup of tea again. Joseph gets the old black bike from the shed, swings the garden gate and rides off, sitting upright with his hands down by his side.
The smell of tarmac is rising everywhere, sizzling under the sun, as the three of them are cycling to the beach. Rolled-up towels are warming on the carriers of their bikes. Beyond the end walls of the purchase houses, tinker caravans and horses shimmer across a roadside field. Joseph’s front wheel has a slow puncture, and the friends stop ahead while he pumps it up yet again. From caravans nearby, a man saunters over, in dusty clothes.
‘Here, let me have a look.’
He produces a jemmy and prises out the inner tube.
‘Ye haven’t got an ould cigarette, have ye?’ he asks.
Joseph gives him down a cigarette and a light. The man continues testing for leaks by spitting on his finger and touching the tube here and there. The spit fizzles at the side of an old puncture repair patch. The man pulls out his shirt, tears a strip off the inner seam, and ties it around the tube where it’s patched. Amazingly, it works.
Just a few more miles by concrete roads, wheeling past quiet local shops and houses, with strips of grass and shady trees between the street and the footpath. Still no glimpse of the sea when they turn at a small sign pointing the way down a lane to the beach.
Where the lane runs out, they trudge, bikes and all, over white sand and marram grass. In a hollow on one side, a couple are making love under a bomber jacket. Beyond the high dunes, the tide is in. Rolling breakers stretch for miles in the sea-swept breeze.
Leave clothes here. The wet sand oozes between his toes. There are a few people swimming, in the distance. Couples leap, splashing water on each other. Sometimes Joseph’s feet slither on bladderwrack, sometimes they stub on hard stone. Remember to swim parallel to the shore. Try floating awhile. Then run out through the lukewarm shallows. The salt stings his sinuses when he lies back, letting the sun dry him, all goosebumps in the gritty sand.
Night. Close the yellow curtains. Hit the pillow, still hearing the sea in a shell. Feel the waves, lifting, falling, lifting, floating, again, and again – forever.
From The London Silence, (c) Stephen Moran, 2004.
(aka Ossian)
The Garden
It really is a treat
to see fruits, vegetables and flowers;
pears and quinces, plums and damsons,
peach, apple and nectarine limbs
splay into fan shapes,
sheltering next to the wall
The buddleia’s swarming with butterflies,
roses buzz with bees and perfume.
Pots, tubs and hanging baskets are filled
to the brim and overflow with dangling geraniums,
green ivy tendrils and trailing fuchsia.
-
There are blackberries, raspberries and bilberries;
cucumbers and tomatoes by the score;
strawberries are rambling by their runners;
cabbages, cauliflowers and marrows compete for best prize;
rhododendrons and azaleas sit at ease in the Japanese bed.
There’s a mallow in bloom, with bold pink faces,
watching over poppies, pansies, petunias,
and flaming French Marigolds.
-
A red and yellow patio is surrounded
by a wall of lobelia and lavender.
The best part is the sparkling lily pond
with frogs leaping in an out
and through the tumbling waterfall,
which trickles down craggy steps.
I could sit here for hours and hours,
if only time could stop
-
I watch green and yellow finches chirping
and preening till they shine;
they hop towards the water,
a proper bath they seek.
Wisteria pendants, dangling
from the highest beams
of the clematis clad pergola,
stroke my face
and I inhale
a myriad
of scents.
Artemisia5656
Summer offerings I cannot remember a summer when we had as good weather as we have this year, but I've commented on this to a number of people, and the response is almost universal, "Yes, but we will pay for it." Summer, in general, and August, in particular, are supposed to be merciless. What few days of break that we receive from searing heat by clouds or rain are supposed to be paid for by humidity and redoubled heat when those cool days are over. Whenever this expectation is not met, we descend to superstition and believe that disaster is soon to befall us.
But disaster has not befallen us yet--knock wood--and hope springs eternal. God in his mercy has granted us some nice summer weather, and gratitude is the appropriate response. We ourselves have done nothing to deserve weather this nice, but we do know there are others, far less worthy than we, who get it all the time, so lets keep our mouths shut and, for heaven's sake, keep smiling.
There is a word used in churches for getting something good that you don't deserve and that is "grace", but grace seems to be something we don't see—or, perhaps, don't administer—often enough to recognize. There is danger in not knowing grace on a personal basis. Don Henley sang a song back in the 80's called The End of the Innocence in which he asked, "How can love survive in such a graceless age?" Love dies when it only goes to those who deserve it.
I grew up in the country and learned about grace from my neighbors. The first taste came in the form of watermelons. Someone in the neighborhood, usually either my Grampa Sam or our neighbor Buck Crabtree, would buy a watermelon, and you must understand getting a small melon suitable for a single family was unheard of. The melons in question could be mistaken for something in the Flintstone's garden.
A melon that big couldn't be chilled in a refrigerator because it wouldn't even fit, so it was put in an old-fashioned washtub and covered in cold water. Once it was cut, it had to be eaten because the general wisdom was that cut melons wilted in the refrigerator. If someone had made melon balls and froze them, as is now commonly done, they would have been put in the insane asylum, "Turn a melon into little balls? What's the matter with you?"
In sharing our neighbor's melon, we learned grace. When you are around people who do engage in such activities, you start buying huge watermelons yourself so you can share too. One might think of this as using watermelons as a means of grace.
I've been reminded of another means of grace recently. One of my coworkers gave me enough green beans to make the Jolly Green Giant look like a midget. Add a little bacon, a few new potatoes, and maybe a little cornbread, and you get something we Okies can call a meal.
Some of you may know I am a lay preacher in my spare time. One of the places where I fill-in is in Opolis. The other day one of the saints from the church of the Lord which is in Opolis handed unto me a variety pack of garden produce that might very well keep my family fed until payday rolls around. For us teachers, there is a long break between the last paycheck of summer and the first one of fall, and with these vegetables, we won't have to worry about the little ones a-getting the scurvy.
These folks recognize that God gave them their respective gardens. They might have cultivated it, planted it, weeded it, watered it, and gathered it, but God grew it. I know how to hoe a tomato, but I don't know how to grow a tomato.
Those who grow vegetables know God's bounty often comes in inconvenient quantities, and we are forced to can, to share, or to let it go to waste. Sharing is easier than canning and much, much cooler. And letting it go to waste is just wrong.
We have a single peach tree, and all of the peaches seem to ripen at once. When they are ripe, nothing smells sweeter, but when they rot, they smell like nothing so much as sin. If I were a fundamentalist, I would say that a rotten, moldy peach is just a foretaste of what's in store in the next world for those who don't share. As it is, I'll just let you make up your own mind.
By Bobby Neal Winters
aka OkieInExile
