It's Still Life

The clay soil here is ironware-hard. Dad, nevertheless, muscles and thrusts a long steel spike into it. It bounces like a pogo hopper.

To break it up, he says.

This, on the hottest day of any that I can recall, and he’s weighted a yellow sheet of grid paper under a stone that maps out where he’ll plant early-cropping potatoes, and garlic. Onions go over there. Tomatoes there, and marigolds everywhere else, like stars lighting the Milky Way. Mum wants cosmos and sweet peas.

Tidy rows, divided and aligned with and by the sun’s movement, and his overthinking what’s best, because Dad insists on what’s best. Perhaps I look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time.

If only my life choices had been so easily aligned with his map. Spoilt for choice puts too many stones in the road.

dVerse Prosery including the line ‘We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time’. from D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Humming Bird’   © Misky 2020 Image from unSplash CC:00