Playing With Water (27 page)

Trailing the damp hem along the gardenias beside the zigzag path. No eyes can see me here alone, triumphant in my sweet hermitage, the vine the shed wears as a hat. All these things I planted desperately hoping for some shelter and grace, something away from harshness, noise and criticism.

This small green place of peace that the birds, the frog and the fat lizard share. The wind, the moon and stars, the reflections in the birdbaths when I walk out to simply be another animal alone, peaceful and grateful.

I’ve gone deaf. Three weeks ago I caught the flu and one day I woke up to silence. The wind blows and I do not hear it. People’s lips move and what they say is a mystery. It is quiet and essential in here in this new world. Strangely, I am more myself than ever before and yet less so too, as I can’t talk except in the most simple way, as if in a foreign language. Honed down to the fine detail of the perfection of silent things, I feel free. Not yet lonely—that would come if this were to last, but it is not expected to. Crossing the road I see cars pass and am surprised, so must remember to be careful. The pure white world of silence. Suddenly I see that the litter of sound somehow sullies the world. Essential things are sharper and more pure. The mandarin tree, shining in the sun, moving gently with three bright fruit, does not hear either. The clear blue sky arches over, indifferent to anything noisy. But then Mozart could fill the house and I would not know, except by seeing the label of the record and the switch turned on. Would the door hear? Or the tap, whose water now flushes out silently? But if my daughter laughed, I would not know the fabulous sound, pearls and roses, except from memory.

I walked around to David’s and, not feeling well enough to mow my lawn, asked him if he would. He
nodded and went to the shed and pulled out his mower. Taking an old black bag, he put a can of petrol in it with a couple of rags and a funnel and together we set off.

Remembering that when David mows his own lawn he uses white poles laid on the ground to flash in the sun against the dark grass, and having no poles, I decided to use white pillowcases to mark the edges of the lawn. Laying out half a dozen pillowcases in a deep rectangle on the lawn, I sat on the back step and watched David rev up the mower and begin. Suddenly I realised the differences between the sighted and the unsighted. Standing at my back door, I look out over the deck towards the end of the garden. The sides run parallel and it was there that the pillowcases were lying, each under a stone to hold them down. But that is not how somebody who can’t see approaches the space. David began to mow as if the garden were a hologram. He went backwards three steps, and fanned out from there, backwards and forwards. Not once did he run in a long line as I had expected. He never noticed the white flash of pillowcases because he never faced them; being involved with another logic of seeing altogether, he simply ran over them backwards. From time to time he spoke to me, but I reminded him that I couldn’t hear. It was enough that he could hear and I could see, and so, with me running to pick up the
pillowcases behind him, and him going on from green space to green space like a butterfly, the lawn was mowed. It took hours of this elegant dance, more like a ballet than anything else. I thought of what a beautiful silent film it would make, the man and the woman moving around the lawn according to their own gifts and deprivations, not at all unhappy, quite the opposite. A smile doesn’t have to be seen to be given, nor does a voice need to be heard for friendship to be there stalwartly. It was the man’s gift of his work and the woman’s pleasure in watching that remained. Also, her astonishment and enchantment.

From time to time David stopped the mower and I ran with the catcher full of grass to the compost heap. Then, occasionally, he wiped the funnel, which he took from the bag on the back step, and filled the mower with petrol, dipping his finger every few moments into the tank to feel how full it was.

There remained the problem of the swatches of grass missed by the mower going slowly in its fan-like dance. David took out a handkerchief and, crawling over the lawn, laid it down where he found a tall thin pattern of grass remaining. Then he had to find the mower, having moved away from it, so he circled around with his hands out until he hit it. Seeing this, I put the pillowcases down on every patch of the mohawk haircut patches of lawn. Then David caught
the flash against the dark and mowed towards it as I snatched back the cloth. In this way, slowly, the long grass was cut. All this took so long the moon came out.

Let us leave them there, the man and the woman, engrossed in the garden.

David Austin,
Old Roses and English Roses,
Peribo, 2002

Margaret Barwick and others,
Tropical and Subtropical Trees,
Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2004

Len Beadell,
A Lifetime in the Bush,
New Holland, Australia, 2004

Maggie Beer,
Maggie’s Orchard,
Viking, Penguin, Australia, 1997

Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Giroux (ed),
One Art: Letters,
Noonday Press (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), New York, 1994

Botanica, The Illustrated A-Z of Over 10,000 Plants and How to Grow Them,
Random House, Australia, 1997

Botanica’s Roses,
Random House Australia, 1999

John Carroll,
The Wreck of Western Culture,
Scribe Publications, 2004

William Dalrymple, F
rom the Holy Mountain,
Flamingo, HarperCollins, 1998

Don DeLillo,
Underworld,
Picador, 1999

Henry Doubleday Research Association of Australia, 3 Paget Street, Richmond NSW 2753

Philip Dowell and Adrian Bailey,
The Book of Ingredients,
Michael Joseph, 1980

George Eliot,
Silas Marner,
Collins Classic, London, 1959

E.M. Forster,
Howard’s End,
Penguin, 2000

Janet Frame,
You are Now Entering the Human Heart,
The Women’s Press, 1984

Antonia Fraser,
The Gunpowder Plot,
Phoenix (Orion),

Masanobu Fukuoka,
One Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming,
Other India Bookstore, 1992

Rose Gray & Ruth Rogers,
River Café Cookbook Two,
Random House, UK, 1997

Germaine Greer,
The Female Eunuch,
Flamingo, HarperCollins Publishers, 1999

Jane Grigson,
English Food,
Ebury Press, 2000

Emile Guillaumin,
The Life of a Simple Man,
University Press of New England, 1982

John and Rosemary Hemphill,
What Herb is That?,
New Holland, Australia, 1997

Ted Hughes,
Birthday Letter,
Faber & Faber, 1998

Belinda Jeffery,
Belinda Jeffery’s 100 Favourite Recipes,
Viking (Penguin), Australia, 2001

Gertrude Jekyll, Richard Bisgrove (Preface)
Gertrude Jekyll’s Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden
—Frances Lincoln Ltd, 2001

Thomas à Kempis,
The Imitation of Christ,
Fount, Great Britain, 1980

Raymond Kersh,
The Edna’s Table Cookbook,
Hodder Headline, Sydney, 1998

Peter Levi and Georgis Pavlopoulos,
A Bottle in the Shade: a Journey in the Western Peloponnese,
Sinclair-Stephenson (Reed International), London, 1996

Christopher Lloyd,
Colour for Adventurous Gardens,
BBC Books, London, 2004

David Mabey and David Collison,
The Perfect Pickle Book
(third ed.), BBC Publications, 1995

Richard Mabey,
Home Country,
Ebury Press, 1990

Roger McDonald,
The Tree in Changing Light,
Random House, Australia, 2002

Henry Mitchell,
The Essential Earthman,
Houghton Mifflin, 1994

Prosper Montagne,
Larousse Gastronomique,
Hamlyn, 2001

Andrew Motion,
Keats,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999

Patrice Newell,
The Olive Grove,
Penguin, Australia, 2000

Mary Oliver,
Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems,
Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 2000

Eleanor Perenyi,
Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden,
Modern Library

Mary Pickford,
Sunshine and Shadow,
William Heinemann Ltd, 1956

Jerry & Skye Rogers,
Bend of the River: A Family Pastoral,
Lansdowne, Sydney, 1998

Sheridan Rogers,
The Cook’s Garden,
HarperCollins, 1992

George Schenk,
Moss Gardening: Including Lichens, Liverworts and other Miniatures,
Timber Press

Simon Sebag-Montefiore,
Prince of Princes,
Phoenix (Orion), 2004

Charmain Solomon,
Vegetarian Food,
Reed Books, Australia, 1993

Sophocles,
Antigone,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998

Wallace Stegner and Page Stegner,
Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier,
Penguin, 2000

Virgil,
The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil,
translated by C Day Lewis, Oxford University Press, 1974

Gilbert White,
A Natural History of Selborne,
Everyman, London, 1993

Diana Wood Conroy,
Fabric of the Ancient Theatre: Excavation Journal from Cyprus,
Moufflon Publishing, Cyprus, 2004

Virginia Woolf,
To the Lighthouse,
Vintage, 1992

Yates Garden Guide,
HarperCollins Publishers, 1998

Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers

First published in Australia in 2005
This edition published in 2010
by HarperCollins
Publishers
Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
www.harpercollins.com.au

Copyright © Kate Llewellyn 2005

The right of Kate Llewellyn to be identified as the moral rights author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000
(Cth).

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Llewellyn, Kate.

Playing with water.

ISBN: 978 0 7322 8131 1 (pbk.)

ISBN: 978 0 7304 4999 7 (ePub)

1. Llewellyn, Kate, 1940—. 2. Women poets, Australian -

Diaries. 3. Authors, Australian - Diaries. 4. Gardening -

New South Wales—South Coast. 5. Lifestyles -

New South Wales—South Coast. I. Title.

A821.3

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