Where Have You Been Today?

14th May 2011 Saturday

I wake with a rasping sore throat and drink a cup of grated ginger and lemon juice sweetened with honey. I think I’m getting a cold but nothing gets worse.

On the phone my father says ‘Where have you been today?’

I have been in the garden. I pick the first white rose - open petalled and perfumed and put it in a vase of my mother’s on the kitchen windowsill next to the Bhuddah, along with some clawed sprigs of honeysuckle.

I have been at the allotment. We sit at the wobbly picnic table in front of the greenhouse and tear into sourdough baguettes, filled with cheddar cheese and tomatillo pickle. While my husband plants tomato seedlings in a bed framed with clingfilm walls, I pick bunches of purple flax and sage flowers, elderflower heads, spinach and asparagus.

I have been on the sofa. I’m reading Diane Ackerman’s book ‘A Hundred Names for Love’. Her husband, a brilliant academic and novelist had a stroke in the left hand side of the brain which controls language. He couldn’t speak. It’s the story of their journey to recovery - how she helped him. I’m wondering if you can recover from Pick’s disease - even though the medics say you can’t.

I have been to Sainsbury’s. We bump into our next door neighbour and chat over our trolleys - hers is full, ours contains pussy cat tuna and wet wipes. She says her husband may be made redundant. They are both younger than us. We tell her about my husband’s brain disease. She’s shocked and says ‘If there’s anything we can do.....’

I have been to Killerton woods. We walk along paths lined with tall unfurling bracken, laced through with pink starred campion and fading bluebells. The evening sun is still warm on my back but the wind is so cold my fingers turn blue. I feel tired and unfit, defeated by the steepness of the slopes. And the effort of finding clues to trigger my husband’s memory.

It’s late when we arrive home but I make a quick curry with a piece of cod from the freezer, a tin of tomatoes, last night’s left over vegetables and chopped wild garlic. We watch a library DVD - Brad Pitt in ‘Seven Years in Tibet’ - almost unbearable at the end - a peaceful country crushed by the fear of another. But maybe the peace inside us, inside me, can’t be destroyed......unless I give it away.