English gardens and my friend Moira

Jane Weary

I’d lived on the street for over a year before we spoke. It was me, more gregarious, louder, younger, who’d initiated the interaction. Mind you, by that time, we’d been nodding acquaintances for some months. Something about the English sensibility that somehow or other you know your neighbour even if you haven’t said more than "hello" and that only very occasionally when absolutely necessary. Generally, a nod will do well enough.

She lived one door down, number 78. She rarely passed my door as there was only the busy Ravenhill through-pass at the end of our street that way, but I walked by her door often on my way to the park or the shops, the library or the bus.  Her front was filled with pots; plants of every description, colour and size. Overflowing. Saturated with moss and damp in the winter, bare branches defiantly rising from sturdy terracotta, but in the summer glorious colours streamed across her paved yard. Flowering shrubs, climbing vines, hanging purples and blues from slender trees, bees and butterflies, birdsong and the most delicious scents. I would often stand just outside my door simply breathing.

I recognized a few, but gardening had never been a strong point for me. It seemed an obsession of hers. Though, come to think of it, I never once saw her weed or cut or re-arrange. After months of emptiness, by early April she’d one day be there, sitting silently on her small canvass folding chair lost among the cacophony of scent and colour. She was usually wrapped in a faded, shapeless sweater, an outfit many of us chose to wear on the cool Belfast days of spring and summer.

Did she have a book? Do the crossword? I don’t remember. Perhaps she simply watched the sleepy street life unfold about her, but I doubt it. I think she was happy enough just to be. There, amongst the world she’d crafted, surrounded with the beauty of the life and the living that best comforted her.

She may well have been sitting in that same chair, for days or weeks before I first noticed her. A small, thin haired, silent elderly woman. Most of the time I never thought about her, didn’t give her a second look on my busy way. But then, when I did glance over, took the time to look up from my phone or my shopping list, or watching my heeled boots navigate the wet stones of the pavement, more often than not I’d see her. A glimpse of wispy grey, a soft pale wrinkled face and the sloppy jumper, half obstructed by a frond of green or a clump of dazzling pink. And then I’d nod and, always she’d nod back, so that I knew she’d seen me and I’d spare a second feeling guilty that I hadn’t nodded earlier.

Eventually though, the nod graduated to a smile, maybe a wave, even a small ‘Hello’ or "Alright?" or even ‘Nice day’.  Me, warm, cheerful, on the move; her, careful, guarded, sitting. And that’s the way it stayed for a year, or maybe even two. I’d only moved to the City a few years prior, she seemed to have been there a lifetime. I ached for friends; she seemed entirely content sitting on her own, sun or cloud, warm or cold.

I began to notice that sometimes a car would pull up; more frequently as the years passed. At first, a small child would generally scuffle out, run up the path, ‘Granny, Granny’ and she’d rouse herself to follow the child indoors. The one, bent following the other, running breathlessly ahead. Later, a frazzled middle-aged woman- or two- would also emerge and lumber into the house carrying packages of varying sizes. Less frequently, a black Mini Cooper would appear and a tall, red-headed siren with a distinct boho dress style would unfold herself, float through the gate only to quickly be lost among the growingly untamed greenery and the flowers.

The first summer we lived there we travelled extensively, were rarely home. The second summer we returned to Canada to welcome our first granddaughter. So, it wasn’t until the third summer that we remained in the city. We purchased a bench and a small patio set from Ikea. We didn’t bother with the umbrella – generally Belfast winds made the idea of such an item more problematic than it was worth. We began to sit outside on warmer evenings for a gin and tonic before supper, or  a coffee mid-morning. And that’s when she and I began to exchange more meaningful discourse than the curt nod or "hello."

Maybe she had come to trust my permanence, like another bush or garden shoot. I clearly wasn’t going anywhere soon. Maybe, too, she understood that, despite my brash greetings, I was not tiresome – knew well enough to keep my own counsel, my head down. I get that. I’ve learned over the years to be a mite cautious myself. Sometimes you extend the hand, only to later rue the day you did so. By the third year, she reckoned, as did I, having the odd word wasn’t going to open any unwanted floodgates of obligation or duty.

Moira and I became friends. We did do the crossword together, started working on Wordle, ate each other’s lemon loaves, shared photos of our growing grand-children and hesitantly bridged the thorny politics of Belfast and then Brexit and then Trump and Covid. Only every so often and almost always over our own garden walls. We had time, time to move beyond the formal into the messy; the exterior to the interior, the outside in. I told her things I didn’t share with others; she confided her childhood trauma. Gradually we opened, spoke of pets, and family, of divorce, death, loss, and joy. In bite sized pieces, in slow spaces that we created, we were never intrusive, never pitying, but gradually offered up to one another past bruises, present worries and future dreams. We knew the other would understand; knew she’d have our back.

And what better friendship can there be than that?

For the next two years, I’d look for her whenever I stepped out. Often, I stopped in to share a cup of tea or drop by with a biscuit or a new plant for her advice as to where I should place it in my garden – slowly morphing into a kind of Eden itself - thanks, of course, to Moira. I met her daughters, began smiling and nodding to them whenever they’d drive up, less often now with younger ones, more often with cleaning supplies, groceries. And then, one day, the youngest with her hippie skirts and reddish mop of curls, brought a walker.

I saw the ambulance arrive and take her away, not once but three times over the following winter. When spring finally arrived and the sun began to warm the garden, when the robins appeared and the magnolia tree in my front rained light pink blossoms upon the road, I began to look for her. Her front yard remained painfully empty. 

And then the note pushed under the front door. One of her daughters. "Thank you," it read, formal, like her mother. “Mum didn’t make friends easily, but she was very fond of you. She’s gone."

This summer the garden is still there. There’s life coming I guess, plants are growing, certain flowers appearing. But there’s no bent head, no grey women in a bulky jumper. The folded chair is gone. I don’t bother looking over that way much, though I know that someone new has bought the place. They’ve painted her faded green door a vulgar red. We haven’t spoken yet.

I suppose I’ll start by nodding.