STUCK IN THE TREE

Before the handyman leaves for the pastures of working in a state prison, I help him build a railing above an embankment, in case car passengers get confused, disembark on the wrong side and take a tumble down to the road. Then he's off to be trained in a life behind bars and I'm left to plant out a flower bed. At lunch I check out the library in town and make enquiries at the local nursery to see what would suit planting. Back at work again, and beginning to turn the soil, I hear a voice and turn to see a short old woman looking down from her balcony, the number 17 stenciled on the balcony base. I said now at least I'll get to see some colour from behind these dreaded iron grills. There are no restraints on her windows as far as I can tell, just the bars of the balcony that I can see, so maybe she's shrinking, I've heard that happening to women as they get older, yes, she's maybe shrinking and her view is starting to resemble more and more a prison cell. Then she says: I'll give you a thousand dollars if you break me out of here. It's tempting, but I decide not to act on it right away, in case it's needed further down the line. At least you're trying to make something beautiful. That's the very least we can do while we're here. But unfortunately your flower bed will be a small part on an otherwise enormous canvas irreparably damaged by an onslaught of grey. She calls me a sweetheart and says it wouldn't be so bad were the house she'd lived in for the past thirty years not six minutes drive away. Once her husband had died, her sons decided that she was in no fit state to be living alone anymore, and so arranged for her to be moved into this: old people's home. That's what it is. Why don't they just say it? You look like you need a whiskey. I tell her maybe later, and mean it. Alone. My sons don't know what alone is. I lived alone the last few years with Otto anyway. Otto? Her husband. Apparently he'd retreated more more the last few years of his life into the machinations of his increasingly muddled mind. She first noticed the change in him when he would suddenly burst out laughing for no particular reason. Then he started dancing in the middle of the street, usually dressed, and she ended up having to lock the front gate, but it never stopped him from trying to climb over. Often she would find him passed out from exhaustion under a nearby tree, impossible to wake, and far too large for her to move. So she would sit there with him, whatever the weather, and look at the tree stump which they had oiled together all those years ago, to preserve the rings, for they knew the rings would outlast them all, and it was the first tree they felled when they came to these parts to raise a family.