The Shed and The Garlic

23rd July 2011 Saturday

The forecast is sunny and dry - the perfect day to clean out the shed. Except I don’t want to do it. We have breakfast in the garden but the wind blows the newspapers in our faces so we retreat into the kitchen and put off the clutter of the shed for a bit longer with another cup of tea. I wonder if I can use my sore leg as an excuse.

When I share my shed antipathy with my husband he says,

‘You don’t have to do it. I will. But you may have to tell me what some of the things are. And you can sort out The Garlic.’

He means the five trays of garlic bulbs he pulled up from the allotment last week, drying off in the shed, their crackly brown stems long as Rapunzel’s hair, clogging up the space, saturating the air with their pungent perfume.

So while he empties the shed - old pots of paint with rusty lids, soggy boxes of Phostrogen plant food, stacks of hanging baskets, cat litter, spades and rakes and various other awkward shaped things with no names, I take on The Garlic.

This involves cutting off the dry hair leaves, rubbing away the outer, soil encrusted skin of the bulbs with both thumbs, snipping off the noodle nest of roots at the other end and collecting the pure white knobbly globes - big and small - in a plastic bowl. I pull a recliner chair into the shade of the honeysuckle hedge and start cutting and rubbing. The pussy cat comes to join me and lounges under the rosemary bush. Next door’s music drowns out my husband’s clattering in the nearly empty shed.

Later I put two globe artichokes on to boil for lunch and wonder how much garlic I can crush into the tahini dressing - and how long garlic will keep in a hot clean shed.

Tonight I can’t stop thinking about those ninety two young people gunned down by one man in Oslo. Yesterday, on an ordinary summer day, lost now to their families and to their friends. While I was watering my garden.