End of the Rainbow

As you get older, your prevailing mood etches itself onto your face. In the shards of mirror surrounding my Grandma’s mosaic, I see reflections of someone who is always tired and never catching up because they’re not sure what that would look like. Since the funeral, I’ve wondered if that’s how my face will look now.

I look up at the man Gran used to call her gentleman friend staring at the piece of paper in his hand.

“What is that?”

“It’s a cheque for $20,000. Your Gran found a collector to buy one of her rare orchids. She asked me to give you this after…

The variety is called Bloom of Ria.”

Ria - that’s what she called me. No one else did. It used to make me feel like a princess. The number blurs. He squeezes my hand before placing a black notebook on the table and leaving me with her thoughts.

The book is warm from the sun. Gran spliced together patches of garden and light. Here it is dappled and ideal for the late afternoon sun. Over there, a shadow falls on the breakfast patio. Rubbing the soft corners of the notebook, I recall how she used to do the same. I never saw her in a rush.

This is a book of intent. It is not my life story. Nothing fixed ever could be. It’s a book of blessings and love.

This place is my life. When there were weeds, I moved them. When there was waste, I composted. Each piece has a place in the continuous community.

She lived the complex systems of the garden cultivating humility towards all there is to know and not know. Social media meant watching the telly with grandchildren. Tick-tock was the sound a clock makes. She ate too much sugar, didn’t have ambition and refused to get a mobile phone.

The phone shouldn’t be able to follow you around dear. It’s creepy.

I create content - whatever that means. My life is about projecting a distorted view of perfection. She had it here all along. Occasionally, she would get a coach to the seaside and find it there too.

The notebook entries are undated. Some go on for pages, others are a few lines.

Do you remember that time you fell off the ladder? Such a neat scar. You were proud of it in the end. After your tears dried, we ate liquorice because you preferred it to chocolate. I loved that about you.

Often, she muses about her life - firm and precise with her letters, like she was with her thoughts. Stories of bombs dropping in Maidstone during the war. Reflections on a lifelong Catholicism that saw her through the loss of two children as well as tying her to a broken marriage. Thoughts on her illness. In all that, there’s no shade of bitterness.

The past need not be a weight. It is a foundation.

I thought of you often here. You are in the soil, in the shapes, in the choices I made. To put the pond just so when you were tiny. To add the fruit bushes you treated like a sweet shop. The deck chairs I placed to get you to rest.

She knew I was adrift - dislocated from history, misdirected from the future and in need of grounding. That’s the message behind the money.

Is the $20,000 enough to get you to rest? Twenty thousand minutes is nearly two weeks. Twenty thousand hours is over two years. Most of my apple trees take that long to offer their first harvest. There’s no impatience, no disappointment, no pressure. Only tending and hope. Don’t force the fruit.

The house is yours too, of course, and the end of the rainbow.

I love you, Ria.

I wonder at the unusual poetry from my Gran who preferred earth and solid tools to whimsy. She thought about legacy and things you could pass on. Family was her joy. My daughter made her grin.

That girl… You did good work when you grew her. And she does a fine job growing you too.

“Little Beatrice-never- Bea because Bea is me.”

Tell her great-grandma said that to her all the time.

I mark the page with the ribbon - as I saw her do over and over. With that small gesture, my heart moves past separation at last. I am part of a line, native to this place. The lines she wrote for me are part of a song that goes on.

Details reveal themselves under my open gaze. A panel of the greenhouse has been replaced with stained glass. The light shines through and throws a spectrum of colour across the old hammock. Climbing aboard, I tuck in my wide trousers and fold into a blanket. While I hug the notebook, my Grandma’s songbook, I rock along with the waves of grief and comfort. The end of the rainbow falls across my face, refracting through tears and shining out into this beautiful life.