Something a little different for you this week, a fictional little piece, but some of which has some basis in fact. It is a little story I wrote for a writer's group prompt a couple of years ago.
There
is a forest of sunflowers at the bottom of my grandmother’s garden, up
against the back picket fence between the chook pen and the outhouse
under the weeping trees.
The
sunflowers are so tall that when we stand among them we can only just
see over the top. We crouch down on the dusty dry red dirt among their
stiff scratchy stalks. The sunflower heads are so big they form a
canopy shading us from the hot sun and casting a yellow glow over us.
Sometimes we take a book with us and read it sitting among the
sunflowers. It’s our secret world where anything is possible. As we doze in the sun the world of the Faraway Tree comes to life under the sunflowers.
Beyond
the sunflowers is grandma’s big vegetable garden stretching all the way
from the back veranda to the chook pen. It seems like every vegetable
you can imagine is growing there. Every
day grandma collects vegetables from the garden for our dinner, pulling
up potatoes, onions and carrots with the dirt still clinging to their
bulbs. Dirt pathways run between the beds and after our bath and on
washing day we scoop the water out of the bath or the laundry trough
with a can and water the garden.
It’s fun to help grandma dig in the garden beds and push the seeds into the damp earth that we have watered with our bath water. But our favourite place is the sunflower patch.
It’s a
mystery how the sunflowers came to grow there. Grandma says she didn’t
plant the seeds. Perhaps old Mr Rosini who lives in the little cottage
over the back lane threw the seeds over the fence one day when he was
cleaning out his budgie’s cage. When
we sit among the sunflowers we can hear him talking in Italian to his
budgie, and Bluey talks back to him.
Sometimes we go with our Aunt to
Mr Rosini's house, taking with us fresh warm bread that Grandma has just
taken out of her big black oven. He
turns on his radio so we can listen to the “children’s hour” and he
pulls off chunks of the soft bread for us and slathers it with jam.
My Aunt says Mr Rosini has lived there since the war. Perhaps the sunflowers are how he repays Grandma for her kindness.
This story is a piece of fiction...but my grandmother did have a long back yard where she grew vegetables, and the outhouse was under weeping trees way down the back (a scary place to visit in the dark!). And there was a man who lived in a little cottage along the laneway that ran along the back of the yard.
Here is a pic of Gramdma's house taken in 1948. She lived in Corrigin in the Western Australian wheatbelt.
I hope you enjoyed my story today.
Thank
you so much for stopping by. I value your comments and look forward to
hearing from you. I will try to visit your blogs in return. Have a
wonderful week.
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