Summer Wine

Lavender

It was the Summer of 2005

when my grandmother died.

Her garden smelled of jasmine -

the sunlight tangled in her white hair.

In my dirty white dress,

sporting grass-stained knees,

I watched her heart breaking.

That was the first time I saw her cry.

It wasn't the last.

She was wearing a paper crown,

telling a bad cracker joke when

her eyes travelled to the empty chair.

I never heard the punch line.

I watched the pale sun set

behind our bare plum tree

with my hands over my ears.

Her living room used to smell of

lavender scented candles and Jo Malone,

of potpourri and Earl Grey,

of Irish bread and tapas.

Now it smells of

wilting lilies and burning out candles,

of dust and Aldi's best cava,

of ready meals and old magazines.

She keeps his photos

poorly hidden in

an old suitcase upstairs -

all hungry eyes and lying smiles.

He did his damage and fled,

leaving us parting gifts of

shame, guilt, fear -

too generous to take any for himself.

He is now just a bad dream -

a birthday card buried in the attic

or a familiar Spanish word.

he'll soon be nothing to me.

He's still everything to her.

for her seventieth birthday

I wanted to give back what he had taken -

forty years of her life and her smile.

I had to settle for

bowls made of carnival glass,

scented Yankee Candles

and Crabtree & Evelyn hand cream.

She'll stow away the bowls,

let the candles burn to nothing

and throw away the half-used hand cream.

all the while she'll be thinking of him

in her empty hea- house.