It feels kind of funny, coming back here after all these years. The house is overgrown, choked with the vines that had always grown so artistically over the old brick. Here and there lies a lonely rock, forced from its surround by the creeping tentacles.
I walk slowly through the garden, seeing in my mind not the tangled tendrils of wild brush, but the haunted hallways of yesteryear: cobbled courtyards and pathways, so symmetrical in their design; perfectly sculptured flowers and bushes that seemed to bloom the year round.
I was very young when first I came here; I couldn't have been more than five or seven. I felt like a princess stepping nervously down from her gilded carriage before a bejeweled palace. It all seemed to grand then, a country hideaway hidden from the 'real' world of noise and smog that was all I had known in my short city days. It had been a world apart, for a lonely little girl…
She quivers apprehensively, scared beyond belief or knowledge. Why is this happening? She wonders. Why is it happening to
me? She wants to cry, to shout, to run. Once she tried, but they caught her quickly enough, and slapped her till her eyes rolled. She never tried it again. Reflexively, tentatively, she touches the place on her cheek where her heightened senses tell her a bruise still lays."There's a good girl, then." Hands handle her roughly out of the car, forcibly straightening her dress and ramming the horrid hat down over her eyes. She is panicky, feels small and awful, but somehow still she refuses to cry. Not in front of them. I won't give them the satisfaction, I won't, I won't! The bruise tingles suggestively.
"Here she is then. You wanted her, you can have her. Don't come running to thrust her back on us when you get sick of the little brat – she's all yours!" Laughter. She bites her lip and tries to ignore the hot, stinging tears that flutter at the sides of her eyes. What am I doing here? If only I knew.
She stands alone beside the car, only dimly conscious of her surroundings. Somewhere behind her those who have dumped her here get into their vehicle and throw her case out after her.
Slowly she raises her head and takes in her new location. She is enveloped in splendour, more so than ever she could imagine. The garden in a riot of colours vivid and welcoming; butterflies dance beckoningly over the blooms, seemingly unaware or uncaring of her presence. In the midst of it all stands the house, and it is the house that now captures her attention. Grand, polished brick, covered lightly with fingers of ivy and honeysuckle. I am to stay here? She wonders. Surely there has to have been some mistake. She turns to look back at the car, for surely they are realising their error and returning to fetch her from this garden of wonder to take her to her new home. Or prison. She wonders which one. But the vehicle is moving, slowly now, faster now, along the driveway, and as she watches it rounds the gateway and pulls onto the road, gone from her gaze in a cloud of dust.
Numbly her fingers find the handle of the battered green old case and grasp it firmly. It's not that heavy. They didn't let her keep that much. Collecting her thoughts and what little remains of her courage, lurking somewhere in the shadowy vaults and recesses of her mind, she takes tremulous steps towards the heavenly palace and the single figure that stands awaiting her on its steps.
Such was the start of my living with Grandma. Certainly not an auspicious beginning, but an interesting one nonetheless, and I like to think I've made up for the impression I must have made. "They" were my aunt and uncle, forced into taking me on the untimely death of my parents. Car crash. I've wondered, now and then, what life would have been like had they lived, but it's not really something I like to dwell on. Past is past and future is future, you have to live for the now, as Grandma would say. She was always coming up with little things like that; a saying here, an expression there, it all added up to my image of Grandma. It's funny how you remember those kind of things about a person, not the things that really matter, like hair colour and eyes and age, but the little things. If you asked me now I'd be stuck to tell you the colour of her eyes or hair, or the tone of her skin. I'd imagine, of course, that she must have been white like me, but in the mind of a child everything is so wonderful and all-encompassing that things like that don't really matter anymore. What does a child care about colour? Only the riotous colours of nature, the gardens, the flowers, the butterflies matter at all. Or they did for me. I can only tell how it was for me.
Was. It's a strange word. But I'm rambling again, aren't I? And I promised I wouldn't do that. But you'll have to bear with me. Now the corridors of my remembering are overgrown and dim, twisted and weedy from neglect, I'm not as sharp as once I was. It happens that way. Life gives with one hand, in love and experiences, and takes with the other. Our faculties are the coin in which we pay for the richness of our lives. I've often thought about that. What if we decided we didn't want to give up our abilities and chose to keep those instead of the experiences we would surely gain otherwise? It would be a pale life, I think. A mere reflection of what we have now. And I know, however much my back may pain in winter and my joints creak with the encroach of advancing age, that I wouldn't trade the life I've had for the rejuvenation of youth. Maybe that's as it should be. What if, when you reached a certain age, you could go back to your twenties and do it all again? Who would? Would anyone? Or would our tiredness finally catch up with us, to drag us down to never-ending sleep? I don't know, and that is how it should be too. If there were no mysteries hidden around the bend there would be no point going down the road, and we would all just stay where we were, living but going nowhere. No, I don't know what will happen, and I don't want to. I want to find that bend, thank you very much, and I want to round it and behold what is before me. When it's time, not before. I don't want to know the ending before I've had a chance to see the middle out.
But I'm rambling again, aren't I? And I did say I wouldn't do that.