Garden In The Fall Becomes A Fall in The Garden

So there I was, felled as unerringly as an expertly toppled old forest oak, on the flat of my back on the garden decking and blinking up at the sky. Winded and Wondering. How did I get here … and was I alright? 

Like an orange that had just had all the juice squeezed out of it, I lay there, taking in the initial shock and befuddling perplexity surrounding the fall itself, and slowly assessing the damage to my shabby autumn body.

Jaze, our house looks awful tall from here …

There was no-one else here, so at least indignity didn’t come into it.

I was still checking whether arms, legs and the rest were all responding as they should when my daughter’s voice called out from the patio door, about 20 metres away. 

“I’m off now, Dad, see you later.”

I was compos mentis enough to know that I was compos mentis enough, and I could tell from her tone she was looking at her phone as she was talking to me.

I could hear the wheeze in my own voice as I panted: ‘Great, love … where are you going?”

“Into town (Dublin City to you) …” 

I could’t help but smile, especially since I seemed to have escaped with nothing but a stinging left calf after my tumble … as I fell, my legs had scraped against the inside of the still-standing frame of the art deco table that had caved under me …

“Did you notice anything about where my voice is coming from?” I asked. “Like, from the ground?”

I wondered if she could actually see sprawled out me, in perfect stargazing by daylight position, behind the herb garden I had recently fleeced back to tidily lopsided.

‘Yeah,” she said, “ I just thought you were lying there … for some reason.”

Strange folk, these parent people …

By this stage I had unwrapped my legs from the ruined table, now an instantly ancient miniature colosseum, and, leaning on one elbow, I began the slow process of peeling my body off the neglected decking which had obviously cushioned my fall — thank God I hadn’t bothered to oil it this summer —  and creaking back into a passably upright position.

The pots of flowers that had stood on the table were a compost spewing sprawl inside the frame now, but hardly an immediate concern. There really was nothing solid beneath those now scattered table tiles, and thinking I would be safe because I had only one foot on it — the other was on the little garden wall running alongside — was shown up for the folly of a careless older man risking all to reach the highest leaves with his hedge-clippers. 

I thought the moans and groans I was making were internal, but one especially deep grunt made me realise I was huffing and puffing out loud, as I rose.

“You know the art deco table, with all the flower pots on it, it broke under me and I fell …”

My daughter’s concern was such she was off the phone now, asking was I okay.

I was surprisingly unharmed, actually, nothing broken, and the only visual damage an interesting series of lines and bloodied scratches on the outside of my left calf that made me think of a Maori tattoo.

Maybe I should have attempted am Irish Haka in honour of my unanticipated kinship with this fine warrior people — and to see was the body really as okay as I had tentatively diagnosed.

Daddy Gobshite, seemingly unparalysed and only bleeding superficially, was obviously fine, and my daughter had a bus to catch, so off she went.

So much for the nobility of good old-fashioned labour in the garden. There was little nobility in this little debacle.

What was that motto above the wrought iron gates at Auschwitz … “Arbeit macht frei … ‘Work Sets You Free’

The horror and the savage irony of that motto for those on the wrong side of those gates, on the wrong side of history .…

But there I was not twenty minutes before, hacking away at the overgrown tangle of clematis and the rest that had recently gotten out of hand, and feeling all virtuous and satisfied with my labours …

Taking a break, I sat down on the bench on the patio for a social media scroll.

My brother was in hospital after a heavy fall had damaged both quadriceps, and on the slow, slow road back to the vigour he and we had always taken for granted.

Had my own fall taken a more sinister turn, I could have been similarly laid up.

I had earlier WhatsApped a photograph of the jungle that had awaited my slightly rusted but trusty hedge-clippers and I, and my laid-up bro was now giving it to me for taking such risks after all that had happened, and preaching the value of the motorised hedge cutter thingie he had himself, and all the labour it saved ‘people of our age’.

Of course this didn’t apply to me, away from the sedentary work of my day job, and off on this adventure. Not letting the old man in, as Clint Eastwood had advised.

There I was hacking away, without ambition or present thought, just like when I was with the rest of the gang of kids, out in the park forest in the long ago, honing and whittling bits of branches and foliage into lopsided tree houses, and generally pushing out the frontiers of our imaginations. 

Until we could feel that synchronised rumble in our carefree bellies and, like tamed jungle cats ready for food and water, we would renounce our wildness and head off home for tea.

And there I was latterly, thorns lacerating my forearms, the sun high, and my rusty old shears a destroyer of jungles. No motorised strimmer for this plucky adventurer.

Pride and hubris before the fall. And rise.