People no longer smell sulfur when they see me. A papaya vendor at Hangman’s Market takes a sudden interest in the depths of a coin purse. A bank clerk’s posture stiffens with dignity and fear. A young man seizes me up and dismisses me as a possible competitor for any female he would seek to bed.
As a result, in my dotage, I’ve permitted myself to become a man of habit. Hangman’s Market each weekday at 11, where I load my string bag like all the market-goers–papaya, yams, some dried sausage. A daily glass of tafia before lunch at Don Pedro’s by the sea. A crossword puzzle I make no real effort to complete. The siesta afterward, while my housekeeper cooks my evening meal without supervision, since she’s the only person who can be trusted, and even then, I make her taste dinner first.…
I’m not a youngster anymore. Our family doctor says I need to exercise more, to lower my blood sugar and to lower my weight. So I walk. A lot. I walk the treadmill at the gym every other day. Four times a week, I head up the road to the Echelon Mall to do my five miles there. Yes, I’ve become a mall walker – I never thought I would.
The first Sunday this March was windy and cold. I grabbed my favorite jacket, a well-worn, tan hoodie I’ve kept at least ten years longer than I should. It’s unraveling around the pockets and cuffs. I donned it, went outside to my truck, and drove to the mall.
Back in the late 1970s and the 1980s, the Echelon Mall was a showplace.…
The trees with branches thick and coarse, barely move when children swing from them. Those trees have strong, deep roots that won’t let a child fall. Such trees have branches that can hold the weight of an argument over who did the dishes last. Such trees can stand to have the very bark torn from their bodies over screams of ‘I hate you’ and ‘just leave me alone.’ Such trees know how to bounce back and start a fresh the next day. Trees like that, solid and unmoving, can handle weather changes—cold stares and burning tension. Trees with roots that cannot be ripped from the ground are able to handle the heat of a good old fiery career change. But there are trees that haven’t grown to be so resilient.…
By now my mother and I do not speak. Nonetheless, she is a presence hovering everywhere I go. She has smelled the same for as long as I remember. When I had outgrown the powdery smell of babies she too stopped smelling like talcum. Now she smells like bubblegum as if littering the air with a confetti of bubblegum wrap long after it has lost its sweetness in her mouth. I assess that smell in the room to confirm she has left or if she has merely retreated to a far corner where I won’t hear the catching of her breath or the restless shuffle of her feet.
And so the smell slowly fades away…
Comforted by this finding, I shift in my seat and lower myself until I am lying comfortably.…
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing (W.W. Norton & Company)
In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf captures the allure of gardens for those with equivocal feelings about fellow humans, writing that Sally Seton “often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her.” Gardens offer us a glimpse into prelapsarian natural beauty and slow living, but as Olivia Laing demonstrates in The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, not everyone gets to relish the peace of these Edens. They are inherently politicized and deeply emotional spaces.
Laing’s celebrated works of creative nonfiction include To the River and The Lonely City, both of which prove she is unrivaled in her ability to interweave memoir with accounts of English landscapes and other artistic touchstones.…
Gerald looked up at the sky, wiping his hands on his overalls. The rain is coming again. It will be arduous, and the crops will probably fail. However, after that comes the season of plenty. The crops will grow.
They’d better.
Marcus, his son, walked along carrying two milk buckets. They exchanged glances.
“Come here,” Gerald said, taking off his tattered Stetson and dropping it on the porch beside him. “We have to talk”
“I’ve got to get the milk over to the…”
“Don’t worry about that,” Gerald took a seat in one of the cork chairs on the porch. “Sit.”
Marcus put the milk down and sat down in the chair beside his father. For a few moments, they peered at the fading sun in the sky.…
