Luky;
YEARS AGO we had been given a new mine house, completed only eighteen months before we moved in. The people before us had put in a very nice lawn, but little else. There had been no time. My husband eyed the veldt around us with its mine shaft in the horizon, and said: "I want trees, trees, trees!" Unlike most of us lesser mortals he was a forthright, determined character, and when he decided on something he set out to make it happen.
Too dry
During the first few weeks we trekked up and down to a nursery where he bought dozens of the most beautiful shrubs. He soon found out his mistake. The year turned out to be a dry year. Every month we received even more stringent directives from our municipality about watering. The wind made up for the rain's shortcomings, and lashed our delicate shrubs hither and yon. Only those in the courtyard, sheltered by high walls survived the onslaught.
Made to match
So my husband asked the people at the nursery: "What is an indigenous tree, does not need water, can take stormy weather, does not shed its leaves in winter, spreads sideways and grows upwards as fast as Jack's beanstalk?"
Pepper trees, they told him. So he planted pepper trees - not just two or three as you or I would have done, but twenty-seven. Twenty-seven pepper trees are a lot of pepper trees.
The three or four in the front garden did not take. They did not die; I don't believe, upon evidence, that it is possible for a pepper tree to die. But they looked miserable, scrawny and thin.
Another story
Those in the back, however, thrived, growing from strength to strength, while even the most beautifully-kept gardens languished. Mercilessly our pepper trees were lashed by the winds, they bent into every direction, and then straightened themselves, asking for more.
If you ask what kind of a Christian I would like to be, I'd say I would like to be a pepper-tree Christian, built for strength rather than for beauty.
Quite a sight
Came the beautiful day when we woke up early and looked out of the window to see a wonderful sight: "Do you see that, Ma?" my husband gasped. "That's shade! Our trees have spread to such an extent that they actually make shade. And to think that I never once broke the water regulations! Admit it - I'm a born gardener."
I declined to comment. Twenty-seven pepper trees placed in convenient distances in Brenthurst or even the Garden of Eden might provide an impressive show. In my little backyard, however, they were already beginning to be too much.
Disapproved
Our neighbours, when they thought they were unobserved, indulged in much headshaking and tongue clicking, because one of the ugly things about pepper trees is that their superficial roots travel a wide distance, consuming everything in their path. The vegetable patches of our neighbours were among the casualties.
"Never mind; they've got shade", my husband commented callously. But I knew not all our neighbours would take his horticultural antics sitting down. And I didn't blame them.
Eviction order
Coming home from work one day, I was told an inspector from the mine had called and left instructions for us to take out every single pepper tree. I had to break the news to my husband, who was crushed.
Next day he went to see his personnel manager, who managed to locate the inspector. My husband had great faith in his personnel manager, so he sat back comfortably, waiting for the latter to present his case.
To his dismay the man first started chuckling, then laughing, and before he put the telephone down he was roaring with mirth.
Impressed
"What did you do, Paddy?" he gasped. "The inspector says you've planted a forest in your backyard. He says if we don't tell Paddy to uproot those trees now, we've had it! Six months from now, he and his family will have disappeared from human ken like Briar Rose.
Sorry, pal - there's nothing I can do. You'll have to pull those trees out at once."
An Irishman who'd come into the office started to laugh. "Yes", he said, "when we Irish do something we do it properly."
Labour needed
We were waiting for my son to come home for the holidays to get the trees out and keep boredom at bay in one operation. My husband looked lovingly at his trees, steeling himself at the thought of the impending parting.
But he had already made his first visit to the nursery since receiving his sentence.
I wondered what he would come up with next.
Catherine Nicolette;
Twenty two years later I went on a pilgrimage to places in my youth, and hesitantly knocked on the house's door where I spent happy years. The current lady of the house welcomed me in, and when I explained that I used to live in the house and would just like to have a look at how it was, she entered into the spirit of things and took me on a grand tour. What surprised me was how small the rooms looked to me now - they have seemed so large when I was growing up. I guess I was so much smaller at that stage. We went out into the back garden, and I surveyed the horizon.
My brother and I spent many happy days snake hunting in the veldt. We wore thick boots which covered our ankles so that if we startled a snake and it bit, it would bite the boot and not us. We never startled a snake. I somehow never remember telling our parents what we were actually getting up to. We used to look at the snakes, skin gleaming in the sunlight, and watch as they slithered back into their burrows. We used to see meerkats (standing upright in families, surveying all around - they eventually came to accept us as a more exotic species of the veldt) and found an old abandoned quarry. We had great fun skirting around the quarry, running our fingers along the jagged edges of stone left exposed to the elements, and looking into the pools of water that seem synonymous with quarries. Anyhow, I digress. Back to the house.
As we took a tour of the back garden, I noticed many cracks in the back garden walls. Over a cup of tea and biscuits, the lady of the house told me with wide eyes of a story that was now Legend in the Neighbourhood. Once, long ago, there lived an Irishman and his large family at the house. He had a little son who loved trees, and whom he wanted to keep happy. So he bought a forest of trees and planted them in the back yard. Eventually the trees had to be removed. However, years later, after an unusually good bout of rain for the often dry Free State, the trees' roots (like the dragons of old) revitalised and snaked their way into the back yard and into the neighbours' yards. Dad's pepper trees were on the move again - underground. They cracked the neighbours' garden walls and the one back garden wall of what had been our home.
Oh yes, I said to the lady. That was my Dad. I kind of remembered him planting trees. She stared at me in horror."They weren't trees, they were a FOREST," she said. Then she recollected herself, and by the time she escorted me out, she had shown the incomparable hospitality of the South African upon receiving an uninvited guest.
I chuckled when I read Mom's blog. However, there was one thing the lady told me that none of us had known at the time. One of my brothers has a learning disability, and used to have lonely moments while growing up. Dad had told his friends at the mine that he had planted the trees because my brother had told him how much he longed to have some trees of his own in the backyard, so that he could walk in them and feel less lonely...
You know what? No-one could do life like my Dad did...
*Photograph taken by Rev. Catherine of beautiful Ireland
No comments:
Post a Comment