Sticky, Green, Fingers

– The Nature of a Mother

Don’t get it twisted – she was a hard worker. She worked 5 days a week, occasionally Saturday mornings too. She worked on the production line of a microwave oven factory in South Wales. She had done so for years and probably still does. With two kids to support and a series of rubbish boyfriends, it must have been hard. It’s little wonder that she…we, stole.

Once we had “done” the shopping we always paid for a couple of items at the checkout so’s not to arouse suspicion. Once safely across the borderline of the store’s exit and en route to the car park, she’d be eyeing-up the supermarket’s well-stocked evergreen flower beds. Then, later, when it was dark and the shop closed; we’d return to the car park to perform what can only be described as, 'a drive-by shrubbing.' She’d drive alongside the supermarket’s car park flower beds (slowly) and when we’d pass a shrub she wanted, I’d lean out the passenger side and grip the plant by the stem, then pull (some were easier to get out than others). She was never greedy and I, never messy. In truth, you’d have never noticed that we had pilfered the flowerbeds. We were horticulture’s answer to Fagin and the Artful Dodger.

Those plants meant the world to her. She planted them in the borders and under the apple tree. She watered them, nurtured them and pruned them in the little back garden of her two-up, two-down on Spring Gardens Terrace (left). And when summer came, it was like they had always been there; belonged there – their leaves shimmying in the sun like little stolen pear cut emerald broaches. Of course, the plants would then need us to steal food for them too.

Years later, I moved into my first boyfriend’s house in a bucolic North London suburb. I remember planting up the raised bed near the boundary line at the front of his property. I made a point to plant extra shrubs just incase the border fell prey to a drive-by shrubbing! No one ever came. I kinda wish they had.

All the hours she worked, it’s little wonder that the plants I stole for her gave me such a bittersweet pleasure. When we eventually got caught shoplifting she was prosecuted. They didn’t prosecute me – I was 10.  I never shoplifted again. I think of her sometimes, especially at this time of year – spring. The tender green blades of my chives are shooting up creating a virescent Olympic Flame as if heralding summer’s fun and games. The mint (which I grow for mint tea) is beginning to sprout – little downy stems in a terracotta nest reaching towards the light; beaks open, like little chicks waiting for a mother to return to them with food. I think of her plants when tending the plants on my penthouse terrace. Looking back, I’m not so sure she stole those plants for herself. I think she wanted to tell me something, only she didn’t know how to do it. So she gave me Mother Nature instead. – Let Mother Nature do the teaching.

No matter how hard things get. No matter how indescribably hard it is to lose the beautifully imperfect, hardy women of our lives. Somehow, Mother Nature always seems to make the unbearable, bearable. – She always balances the books. She always manages to bring all of her children home – back to the beginning, back to the earth.

Lately – and I doubt this is connected to my drive-by shrubbing days – I have taken to tending my roof garden at night; in the early hours. I prefer not to utilize the outdoor lighting, instead opting to let my eyes adjust to the darkness and carrying a torch like a jewel thief. You could say I’ve become a kind of midnight gardener. In the city nature lives in the darkness. – I can hear the birds at night; sense the river moving, feel the cold eucalyptus-tinged air on my face and be enlightened by a stolen moment moon. At last, reunited with my mother – Mother Nature…

Happy Easter,

- Cheyelle

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