pretty

Yesterday I bought a wrap-over skirt, a pretty flowery thing with two scoops, a gap, flounces and a curvy hem. Obviously, it also sported ties for the wrap-around palaver, but no holes for one tie to go through. Even in the fitting room I felt a wash of anxiety roll over me, the no hole fact showing me losing my skirt in a public place. It would fall to the ground but not leave me because the ties would remain tied and this would assuredly result in my being stuck in the middle of a right fankle, unable to go forward or back without falling flat on my face. I brushed the image aside and the feelings associated, that rush of shame as I revealed my bottom in her ancient knickers, my old flabby thighs, the flopskin of my belly a glaring white light for all the world to see or, at least, those sharing the pavement with me. Go away, image, I hissed because I liked the skirt, had arrived in Africa skirtless and those pretty tops have hung miserably on their hangers inside a dark cupboard, longing for a skirt companion with accompanying mutters. It, the skirt, was also the only item of clothing in the store made of cotton. All the others were made of some slimy material that made me shudder. Slimy clings, slimy is hot, slimy is, well, slimy.

Back home I try the skirt on with the pretty top that doesn’t match. Obviously. We look nice together, me, the skirt and the top that doesn’t match and I pirouette before the long mirror, feeling intact and rather attractive. Then I begin to move about, making coffee, breakfast, clearing this, tidying that and that’s when I sense mutiny. The ties, as I had imagined, are busy working loose from the waistband of the skirt. I check. There is a gap of at least 3 inches between the ties and the skirt, a spread of lardy fat poking through. Singularly unattractive. I have only moved a few short paces, not walked far at all, and that image of my cotton collapse returns in technicolour. What to do? I know, I will make a hole, just snip one with scissors, no need to bind the edges, it’s only small after all. This done, I thread one tie through and tie a bow behind. That’s better. Only it isn’t. Still the mutinous skirt is determined to have her say, to establish control over me, and, although the result is not quite the same, I now notice one side of this damn skirt hanging lower than the other as the ties fight the waistband for supremacy. Who on earth designed this flaming skirt and got away with it, and not just once? There were at least ten of them on the rail when I selected my size. Do the designers not check a wrap over skirt for flaws, send some woman out hiking in it, up a mountain preferably, just as a car manufacturer would send new vehicles for a test drive (up a mountain preferably) or a lipstick maker trial a lipstick to check it doesn’t run into a woman’s chin wrinkles or set like concrete in hot sun thus giving her a permanent pout? Hasn’t someone tried this skirt out, worked in it and walked in it? Or did the designer just like the pretty flowery look of the thing with its scooped edges, flounces, a gap and a curvy hem and say This’ll Do, the stores are waiting for delivery?

I admit skirt defeat and remove it, apologising to the pretty tops that don’t match, obviously, and they go into a sulk. I can hear them muttering as I close them back into the dark. I consider my mistake in not listening to my instincts in that fitting room, in being tempted by pretty flowers and something new. How often do I do this? Too often.

As to the damnably mutinous skirt, I might cut it up to use as material for something else unskirt-ish one day just to hear it squeal. As I shut it up with the tops, frock back up and flounce away, I swear I hear it giggle.

As the garden grows into complete hilarity, with an ebullient chuckle, I watch the weeds find their places. They’re clever, these weeds, finding quiet little dark places to begin their journey, rising into view long after the roots have winkled their way around, along and through those finer species, once carefully placed by us. When we clear space for such a planting, we see, not the weeds to come, or those now removed, but just this fine sunny spot, allocated to a shrub or bush, envisioned in full majestic bloom, with the ground floor as peaty brown as it was at the start.

Well Ho, says Mother Earth, and Hum to that, for she has other plans and she’s not giving them up to any old human. Let them eat cake, she says, for now.

Over winter the roots keep spreading, like witches fingers, in the silence of the earth, out of view, out of mind. Some of us employ evil sprays, conveniently forgetting the lasting damage any of them might do in the long term. We don’t worry too much about long term, unless we are a fledged and experienced gardener, which I am not. I quite understand those who buy all their bedding plants each year, thus creating what appears to be an established garden. It’s tempting. We don’t use sprays, choosing, instead, to allow the witches fingers room and time to stake their hold. Then, whatever Spring might bring in showers, snow, frosts and sunshine, these roots decide to reach for the sky, pushing up green and strong, and tempting me with pretty yellow blooms the bees love to visit. Well, that makes it okay then, if the bees choose thus.

It thinks me about weeds, or wild flowers in the wrong places. But who says it’s so? The wild flowers were here long before me and they’ll be here long after me, so which of us has rights in this little hill garden?

I was a weed, once. I think we can all admit to that at some point in our lives; when we just don’t fit in. Actually, I think I have often been a weed, but not ‘weedy’. Finely pedigreed folk who do fit in, might want to remove me, for I pinch the light and the live-giving water allocated to them. But, the strength and tenacity of me might undermine them, as long as I keep moving, keep finding new ways to reach the sun, keep producing pretty blooms for the bees. This is not a ‘them’ and ‘us’ thing, for we all have our place and time in this life, but, instead, of ‘both’. I never did like either/or scenarios, opting every time for a laterally sought choice. We know there is room for all of us, but the trouble is always one of boundaries – where you stop and I begin. After all, we don’t have the same voices, you and I, nor the same dreams, visions, hopes and plans. You may be planning for something I have no interest in. This doesn’t make either of us wrong nor right, just different. We laughingly say ‘Vive la difference!’ in our best french accent, but most of us have no idea what it means as a life choice. No matter how careful we are with our inner thoughts, we all make judgements on others. Words like ‘should’ and ‘ought’ pop into our mouths and out again and we feel regret long after the damage is done, for, in speaking those words about another living soul, we have shown we are better than they and have established it firmly in the ears of the listener.

I kick myself often for such worthless chatter, gossip to call it by it’s proper name. If I name a weed, I damage three people. Myself, the weed and the listener, and on what authority I ask myself?

In reply, I look out of the window, at the fancy shrub about to bloom, and, then down towards the so-called weeds. The shrub will never surprise me inside it’s controlled boundary limits, but the long-tailed fronded grasses, the speckly indigo blooms of the wild forget-me-nots, the creeping buttercups, the purple-belled ground ivy and the Lady Elizabeth poppies, the colour of sunshine……?

Well they will.