New vistas

I sit here with my coffee mug half full. The men are resting awhile. As I see them, three, making short work of the overgrown lawn and digging clumps of old soil and old grass out to toss into the hole below the deck (that's going to be fixed next), I am amazed that until last year, I had done all this work myself. To save money and to indulge my need to work and till the earth where earlier I had had a corner of the verandah in Shantikunj and then nothing at all, in that horrid prison space of Chunam Lane.

Since the accident, and that excruciating crunch of metal after the screech of wheels, I have been bent over with pain almost every day. Yet, like many pains, it is invisible and therefore difficult to share with unseeing hearts. Then there was the matter of who I am and who I am perceived to be: Oh it's her. She knows how to fend for herself. Oh it's her, don't bother leaving daal shaak for her, she can eat rotli saathey salad. Oh, it's her. She can do this all by herself. So it went over and over and over.

Now with a few dollars saved from this and that, not because I cannot afford a makeover, but because the thrill of doing things on a shoe string budget is fashionable when you have money for the bragging rights perhaps, I hired this team of diggers.

Yet, the years of regulation and looking over my shoulder for the disapproval come to mind and the panic  kicks in. Some delay, a little glitch and I cringe as if I am going to hear that voice say: Why exactly are you doing this? And how do you plan to finish it? And how are you planning to pay for this?

My heart soars even as the wind rushes through the cedars like waves of a stormy sea. I do not have to listen to your criticism anymore. I do not have to see your raised eyebrows oozing disapproval. or quell the disappointment when you refuse to eat with us on the patio. And oh, how lovely is that feeling of now having to look over my shoulder or my ankles at the chains holding me down.

I observe that I was always the encourager to your every project and your every dream. Yet mine were never good enough to support whole heartedly.

That's just who we are I know now. And when you walk in and out of the space that still bears your name but not even a smidgen of your soul, I do not look up anymore.

The garden is coming along nicely. It is a work in progress, like me. And I am okay with that.