Towards The Sky
With an infantile spurt of excited spontaneity, I had leapt from bed to experience the radiant tickle from the sun and the icy air with the spirit of a man many years my junior. Most of the solitarily magnificent garden basked in the light, but the sun’s aborted attempt to penetrate the back wall cast a malevolent shadow over the depleted flowerbeds, almost forcing them into seclusion. My breath curled peacefully upwards as I admired the bare tree at the bottom of the garden, imagining the picture it formed in the spring, when the pink and white blossom engulfed its branches.The avid grass poked upwards with zeal for growth, perky and ardent, pullulating easily with the delicate layer of moisture remaining from the night. Framed in the back doorway was my wife,with her barely-existent lips curved into a familiar, knowing smile. The whistling wind made her white nightdress billow and the silvery curls atop her head, the remnants of her illness, danced in the morning sunshine. I gave her the same intrepid morning kiss I had every day for the last fifty years, which she returned with unconvincing reluctance and a glint of ecstasy in her eye. The intricate details of her face were illuminated by the sun’s glare; a thousand wrinkles splayed out from her eyes, and the grey eyes themselves shimmered with adoration in the morning sunlight as she absorbed me. A few of the wrinkles embedded in the almost transparent skin of her forehead were broken by a small scar towards her left temple. She had been robbed of her conventional fairness by the omnipotent thief, Time. However, to me, her contented smile sparked in her a fierce and blazing beauty. It was impossible to accept that the garden, which was now drab and littered with brown leaves, had, just a few months before,
47 17
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker