snowdrops drip thoughts of you

I arrive unexpectedly and the door is locked, but it doesn’t matter. I squeeze my hand through the letter box and catch the thread hanging there with my pinkie. I hook it and feel the weight of the key on the other end, a fish on a line deep in the water of the Mill Dam. And I pull it up and out through the letterbox into the air and open the front door.

The porch welcomes me with a verdant fuzz from the tomato plants lined up along the window. I lift the the pot second from the end and there is the other door key to let me into the house.
Inside hums with silence, a scent of Imperial Leather.

“Gran?”

I go through and find the piano lid up. The curtains are open and light filters through the netting. There is a cover over the birdcage. On her empty chair is the pretty woven shawl she sits on and it is ruffled. She is here somewhere.
I head for the kitchen and see the door to the back porch is open and there she is out there busy with her flowers. Little green blocks of oasis are piled on the table where she works.
I don’t want to startle.

“Gran, it’s only me.”

She turns with ferns in her hands. She is domed in privation and it takes a while for my intrusion to puncture where she is. I can see she has been crying. Foliage and petal are already blossoming to perfect form on the table where she works at arranging them.
“Oh son, I never heard you come in.”
I go over an give her a wee hello kiss and smell the earth and garden and Imperial Leather from her.
“A cup of tea?”

She puts the ferns into a bucket of water and leaves her hands in there for a moment. Its cool helping her surface back to me there in her kitchen with her ten wee finger fishes waggling in the water. She smiles.
“I don’t mind..”

So I start to fill the kettle and she takes a towel and dries her hands and then her eyes. She comes into the kitchen and closes the door to the back porch. She goes to a cupboard and gets two cups and the biscuit tin.