The Morning After

BLOOM 6

 

It's amazing what a good night's sleep can do for you.
Sleep has been a bit here-and-there-ian, a fickle bedfellow recently.
While tiredness, inevitably, has been a Siamese twin.
Is it not ever thus?
However, this morning I feel as fresh as a daisy, as my mother used to say.

I suppose there is truth in the old adage. Not about daisies - but about the enemy you know being less fearful than the one you don't.
The trees for my Yeats garden at Bloom have certainly been a foe beyond the gates - but, in tree terms, this was the week that was. Bad enough for me, but I don't even want to think about how it's been for Jack.
Jack, as you may recall, has put his shoulder to the Bloom-wheel and now also goes under the alternative title of 'My Hero'.
He spent last week, in gales, rain, mizzle and more gales, gouging, slinging and lifting trees out of the ground, into pots, out of pots, to this location, to that location and generally getting soaked, re-soaked and beyond frazzled.
All - I am reliably informed - without losing it.
Some trick.

As you can probably tell, I wasn't there.
I wasn't idle last week - I'm feeling the need to justify myself here, I just put in my hours elsewhere. My only contribution to the Tree Operation was sleepless nights.
A futile offering indeed.
Yesterday, I drove down to Jack's armed with a bottle of good whiskey.
It seemed wholly, woefully inadequate.

The deep trenches gouged in the verge of his laneway told their own sorry tale of overburdened vehicles in-coming.
We reviewed the trees in minute detail. They are all on drips in his Intensive Care Ward, as he calls it, and no patient in any ward has either been better cared for or had a more probing doctor's round than ours.
They are all in one place, they are enormous and they look great - but, admittedly, it is a bit early to say. They might still suffer from fatal arrests and turn up their muddy toes. I hope not. I feel bad enough wrenching them from their cosy, unremarkable homes.
Or rather, having them wrenched.

I came home and spent the rest of the afternoon with a tape measure and a bag of flour in the orchard.

The In-Charge, at my request, had cordoned off a plot the size of the garden at Bloom. I need to get a feel for the reality of it, trees and all.
The hens thought it was a terrific new game, and followed on my heels like the birds in Hansel and Gretel, but eventually even they got bored with eating it - white, self-raising wouldn't be high on their list.
The trees are big, there's no doubt about it, but they need to be. They need to look mature, like they've always been there.
I still have flutters of unease. Suppose they are too big? Suppose they die? HOW am I to get them to Dublin in one piece - in leaf, by then? Suppose they don't come into leaf - dead trees don't come into leaf...  Suppose, suppose, suppose...
But at least I now have them - they are safe, in one place, in the ICU and for the moment at least, present, correct and ticked off.
At some level I suppose something has relaxed, because I slept like the proverbial baby.
Even though I wasn't the one drinking the whiskey.

And this morning, Easter Day, despite the battering, freezing, howling weather we have had this week, my garden is calm and still and full of timid flowers.
Perhaps I am calm and still and full of timid optimism.
For today anyway.