September, 2000 Monthly Feature : Each month I have been putting together some of my favourites to share with you. Archives
Remember Me
[ "Remember me, but ah! Forget my fate"
Dido's Lament ]
A wrong turn, a tiny lane and an abandoned house scheduled for demolition. How could I not be filled with curiosity? I park the car under a spreading shade tree and try the door. Ancient metal gives under my hand it and swings open. What a feast here for the imagination. First glance is filled with dirt and grime and evidence of wild things. Mice and birds have made their home where proud wives once kept a home. Leaning carefully against the crumbling doorpost, I half close my eyes and look for that other, hidden, home inside this abandoned shelter.
They've left their marks, the women that lived here once. Brides were carried across this scuffed threshold and tireless hands kept this parlor waxed and dusted. Kitchen counters bear the scars of innumerable meals prepared there. Broken jars in a mouse infested pantry are all that is left of long-ago steamy September days spent canning and preserving foods for the winter. Young mothers wore those circles on bedroom floors during long nights of walking fevered infants, and I wonder if their hopes and dreams for their children were very different from my own. The walls of the master bedroom bore silent witness to conceptions, births, and probably even death. Did she cry alone, a widow at the end?
Outside, through the kitchen door, you can see where the garden used to be. Unable to resist the now-wild roses, I venture outside. A garden wall tumbles down amid an overgrown rose garden where no one walks anymore. I can almost see a woman, carrying a basket for flowers, meandering the brick garden path. Gone are the nettles blowing around, the ungainly grass seeds scattering the paths. No burrs catch her pretty summer gown.
If you look, if you acknowledge the signs left here, those ghosts become as palpable as a summer morning's mist. To bring them to life again, even for just a moment, this is what attracts me to these places. That same thing leads me to estate auctions - an attempt to see beyond today, to see what and who were there once, the families that lived and loved and argued in those rooms, who played and read and wrote on those desks and tables.
My attention wanders back to today, and the shades of yesterday slowly fade away. I absentmindedly brush one heavy headed flower with the tip of a careless finger and it sheds its petals in a swift flurry like a creamy snowdrift. Filled with remorse, I stoop to collect them like an errant Ophelia, and bring them home.
K.M.G.
|
The Deserted Garden (excerpt)
Old garden rose-trees hedged it in,
Bedropt with roses waxen-white
Well satisfied with dew and light
And careless to be seen.
Long years ago it might befall,
When all the garden flowers were trim,
The grave old gardener prided him
On these the most of all.
Some lady, stately overmuch,
Here moving with a silken noise,
Has blushed beside them at the voice
That likened her to such.
And these, to make a diadem,
She often may have plucked and twined,
Half-smiling as it came to mind
That few would look at them.
Oh, little thought that lady proud,
A child would watch her fair white rose,
When buried lay her whiter brows,
And silk was changed for shroud!
Elizabeth Barret Browning |
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