Chapter 6
As ideas go, this was one of Rose’s best. She stops along the woodland path, tilts her face to the patch of blue sky peeping through the treetops above, closes her eyes and listens. There’s a soft sigh as the gentle breeze dances amongst the new leaves unfurling on the branches and rustles the tall grasses in the meadow beyond. Birds sing their hearts out, up high and down low, and everywhere new life is bursting from grass, shrub and tree. Setting off again, Rose reflects on how good it is to be out in nature, loosed from schedule and routine. Only this morning she’d been fighting off melancholy and gloomy thoughts, but now something’s lifted. Things feel lighter. She feels lighter. Upon arrival here, as soon as she got out of the car, she noticed the shift. The scent of fresh earth, wet grass and the essence of damp woodland bathed in dappled sunlight overwhelmed her senses.
Buoyed by this new lightness, Rose’s pace quickens, and soon, the woodland path begins to widen and dip until she’s led in wonder to an open copse of mighty oak trees standing in a circle around a vibrant mass of bluebells which carpet every inch of the diameter. From the roots of the oaks is an answering mass of white flowers. Wild garlic. Its pungency flavours the air and she swallows an ache in her throat. It’s the exact spot in the photo she was looking at, the spring she turned sixteen. No ifs or buts, or question marks – this is it. Bending to pick a stem, giddiness overtakes her and she places a hand against the rough, damp bark of the tree trunk. The delicate white flower quivers under her touch and she pops it into her mouth, reliving and savouring the memory of that day, devouring the intoxicating lifeblood of youth and joyful expectation.
Rose finds that she wants to laugh out loud and sing. She hasn’t sung for many years, even though people tell her she should. Her voice had been left behind in the past, to keep company with the ambition and hope that she’d join a band. With the tree trunk supporting her and the heady mix of crushed garlic and woodland in her lungs, she closes her eyes and goes back to her sixteenth birthday. Wrapped in that memory, she watches a young woman and her boyfriend dance through the bluebells, singing together, earnest in their self-belief and their belief in each other, delighting in the sound of their voices spiralling up and up, as spring awakened and carried them with her.
Few people have crossed Rose’s path today and upon opening her eyes, she finds herself quite alone. With the taste of wild garlic on her tongue, an overwhelming desire to sing won’t be quashed, and she opens her mouth, takes a huge breath and launches into ‘Dreams’ by Fleetwood Mac, one that she and Tris had loved. Independent of her control, Rose’s arms rise and stretch, and she’s lost in the music, twirling and dancing through the bluebells and garlic, her head tilting from side to side, hair falling across her face. This is the first time she’s sung aloud like this for years – with abandon, with heart – and it feels incredible. She feels incredible. Incredible and ridiculously happy, steeped in the power of nature and growing things.
Out of breath, Rose slides her back down a tree trunk until she’s sitting at its roots. Legs bent, she rests her forehead on her knees and for the second time today, find her cheeks wet. That phrase – the power of nature and growing things – has found a turntable in her thoughts and plays on repeat. As a breeze finds a clump of garlic flowers next to her, like the daffodils in the garden earlier, they nod along with her thoughts, and the compulsion to dig up a few bulbs is overwhelming. No … no, she can’t, because stealing flowers is probably not very good woodland behaviour, even though there are thousands of them. A sturdy twig is Rose’s trowel and soon she has six bulbs in her coat pocket, which is a surprise, as she’d not intended to do that. After a furtive glance around, she jumps up and hurries back along the path. There’s an urgent need to get them in the damp earth of her garden.
In her head on the drive home, Rose pictures the garlic growing amongst the daffodils in her ‘wrap-around’ cottage garden. Glen tended it well, but in his logical and organised way. Rose never really had much to do with it – well, apart from sitting in it when she had the time. It’s always been neat and ordered, mostly laid to lawn, unadventurous (a bit like herself). A few namesake rose bushes and one or two splashes of colour grace the perimeter, but it’s never been a place of experiment, of wildness, of vibrancy. Until today, that is. Rose thinks about the photo and the woodland and the memory. Mostly the memory, and she concludes that in the future, whenever she looks at the garlic, she’ll remember the Rose from then. The songbird Rose. The Rose full of hope for the future. The Rose she was before she had a box.
* * *
The heady feeling from the woods is still riding shotgun as she threads her way through the tiny Cornish lanes. Rose marvels at the colours in the hedgerows, fields and gardens… It’s as if she’s seeing everything with fresh eyes. A line of birds perched on the wires resemble musical notes on a score. The yellow rapeseed fields in the distance look as if the sun’s crashed into them, the hills dressed in emerald and olive slide down to the cerulean ocean, and in people’s gardens, daffodils, primroses and tulips herald the birth of the season – an awakening of new hope.
Primroses, wow.She smiles as another memory comes at her, vivid and clear, of Bella when she was about two years old. She’s dressed in her Paddington Bear top and patchwork jeans, her dark hair in bunches, crouching on her haunches to smell the yellow, blue and pink primroses that grew in pots by the back door. Bella always loved those flowers. She called them ‘prim-noses’ for a while, which caused much hilarity between Rose and Glen, and they missed it when Bella mastered the correct pronunciation. The pots and primroses are long gone, but she resolves to buy some tomorrow.