Today I walked near the house where I lived for 16 years. That’s twelve years longer than I have lived anywhere else in my life. Most of those years I was crippled by a chronic illness and longed to walk the earth freely, so that area has a special poignancy, like the view from a prison cell. There’s a cemetery whose main gate is opposite the back of my old house. I found myself in its “Snowdrop Garden”, a walled section dedicated to neonatal casualties: some stillborn, others surviving a day or a month. Little plaques were screwed to the walls, mostly giving one date only, whether birth, death or both was not made clear. Some had not visited our planet long enough to acquire their own name. The snowdrops are now in flower, and push through the lawn between graves strewn with dead floral tributes. I didn’t have a camera with me. Though there was no one to see me, I felt a fool for the tears that streamed down my cheeks. I remembered first moving into that house, and planning that we’d treat the cemetery as our own extended garden.
Our children learned to ride bicycles on its paths which were rarely disturbed by other visitors. The main one is bordered with linden trees, pollarded annually and trained on wires. Just walking the same paths reminded me of vague yearnings which I never understood then. I still don’t know why those plaques, like “Baby Jones: 11-4-1998” made me weep. Perhaps it was that the parents yearned for what they never knew with a pure and primitive love that owed nothing to the ways of this world. Perhaps it was that the babies were spared the disappointments and compromises that hit the rest of us. Perhaps I was nostalgic for my own stillborn hopes.
Some of the comments below refer to the previous post, about bricklaying and building a bench.
a wayfarer’s notes 
Vincent, I've missed your blogs, and worried a little about your absence. I was very moved by this. Welcome back.
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Oh thank you Anonymous. I wish I knew who you were!
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Even when you speak of sorrow and disappointment, there is great beauty in your words.
Thank you for that Vincent.
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I cannot think of snowdrops without thinking of my late father. He had moved down to Highcliff where he had a newsagents shop. One morning one of the paper boys didn't turn up so my father did the lads round but when he returned to the shop he had a heart attack and died. This was in January and outside the shop were buckets of snowdrops waiting to be planted in clusters. As we got down to the business of clearing the shop out ready to hand it back to the landlady we divided the clusters of snowdrops between us. I planted mine in my back garden but a year later we had to move so I didnt get the benefit of seeing them each year.
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Vincent,
Nice to see you back.
You've been working very hard to build things that will allow you to relax. You are not a stranger to work as I am, so it's hard for me to understand. But I can't wait until you will finally be able to sit down and enjoy your masterpieces.
Bless you for giving some of your thought and time to the souls of children in the garden. Don't be ashamed of crying, for it shows the beauty and gentleness of your warm heart.
P.S. I always wonder who some of my anonymous commenters are, too. The mystery, however, is always a lot of fun!
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I would humbly suggest you are a carpenter, bricklayer and builder of words too!
How fortunate we are able to sit back on our own virtual backfree bench and watch the wonder of your blog grow.
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shame for doing an unfamiliar task poorly? no, the shame should be for never trying, or, having tried, not learned from the experience!
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I envy you for having enough time for these things.
Today I drove 70 kilometers and back to bring my two boys and two of their friends to spend three days with me at my place. I let all four of them sleep on a mattress laid on the bare floor in the other bedroom. There is just still too much work to do.
Anyway they seem to be happy to be with me in a strange new place.
Both of them are sporting hair that reach almost to the waist, which makes them look like strangers or even angels. Frisians among Groningers.
I just kept staring at the younger one who at 14, proudly noted that he was now taller than me.
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Hayden it is all very well to say what we should reserve shame for. I chose the word as the best I could think of at the time to describe a reaction that I could not help, for it's an emotion independent of the will or the conscious mind. It eats away at me unseen when it happens, sapping my strength: part of a deep-rooted perfectionism which betrays some kind of insecurity perhaps. Oh, if only I could get rid of it!
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Siegfried, how much do you envy my free time? How many years of your youth would you give away to experience the rewards of old age and retirement?
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Charles, thanks! Writing the above post has exorcised the sorrow and disappointment.
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Lady in Red, would buying some other snowdrops and planting them in place of the ones left behind be a way of remembering?
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Sophia, are you a stranger to work? Then do make the most of it whilst it lasts!
Yes, I want to sit down and enjoy the bench, but there is a new problem with mortar which did not stick properly so it will be a while yet. But this is life's lesson to me (see response to Hayden) how to overcome perfectionism and consequent shame.
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DBA, I do think of words as a medium in which to build, like bricklaying!
We take the standard words, as it were from the dictionary, and we cement them together with grammar and the flow of sense – common shared sense, otherwise there would be no communication.
Like you (the way I see you, through your online writings alone) I focus on small-scale building, just a few hundred words, in which it is possible to pay great attention to that flow of sense, to try and harmonise it with the expectations and life-experience of the reader to create something worth saying & easy to absorb.
And to build intuitively, spontaneously, whilst paying to the emerging construction the compliment of thorough editing.
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beautiful post, sometimes its good to be occupied with physical work, even to ignore blogging for a while…
Your cemetry remids me somewhat of a walled garden we visit every February to see the snowdrops though ours isn't a cemetry. I alwaysfind gravesof children very moving, all that lost potential
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Vincent, just heard about the quake, hope you are okay, how was the shakes in your area? Hayden just had one in S.F. a week or so ago, yours may have been bigger huh? 5.3 I am reading. Stay well, take care.
I am taking this post to read today, will return tonight and comment. See you later.
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Jim, if I had been awake when the earthquake occurred I might have felt and enjoyed it as some did around this area, but it wasn't a big one and its centre was about 150 miles away. I remember one in North Wales 25 years ago when I was near epicentre but camping in a little tent and awakened by it early on a sunny morning. That was very sensual. only one person in the country was injured and this was when a chimney (presumably unstable already) collapsed & went through roof of a house.
Nice to know you are making the rounds, Jim. I always check your blog (R-R) but as you may notice, seldom comment these days. If I did it would be to argue of course!
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Crafty Green Poet, thanks for your comments. You have a beautiful site & I like your poems. I found your post about that walled garden with snowdrops. I've added you to my Google Reader checking thing.
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Vincent, marvelous post, great writing, very real and personal subject matter, would that we could all work like this without the pressures of economics and time, a pleasure indeed, and I speak of both of the manual and technical physical labor, as well as the craft and art of the writing. In that, with peace around us as well, we just might have a perfect world, one where shame is no longer known.
Shame is a subject in itself, reading from your reply to Hayden, one which you have now gotten my thoughts searching.
I am perhaps going to be able to do some little gardening in this yard or another, maybe in about a year, maybe next spring, or some winter stuff this coming winter, there is some hope in that for me.
Excellent post Vincent, it does good to take breaks and have variety in these, our doings, I know that is true for me every so often, even from my obsessions I have to have breaks and have learned to embrace them where I once used to fight them.
I thought you were closer to the epicenter, I am glad you are well and busy. I never heard a quake called 'sensual' before.
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reading again, I chuckled at your reference to the sterility of the flowering cherry tree. Do you suppose the sort that are raised exclusively for blooms are really just male trees? Many fruit trees require both females and a male to fertilize and grow a crop. It always amuses me to read the nursery catalogs and see “male tree. Can fertilize up to 8 females. DOES NOT BEAR FRUIT.” Duhh.
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No Hayden, I don't think it's the sex of the tree, it's the result of selective breeding to produce the best blooms with double petals, whereas the fruiting ones are selectively bred for the best fruit.
I heard on the radio the other day a piece about the almond trees in California, where most of the world's almonds are sourced, and their dependence on millions of bees brought in for the blossom season, which I suppose is now. there was no mention fortunately of that bee disappearance syndrome that we heard of a year or two ago.
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Jim, thanks for your further comment, with much contained in it. You mention the possibility of a perfect world – I know you are working towards that in the way you know best and so am I: the similarity which I noticed when I first met you online – nearly 2 years ago? – was that we both fearlessly follow our impulse in this direction, trying to bring forth that which we find precious.
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lyrical!
i am afraid you are turning into a poet from a prose writer. go for a check up.
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[…] day after posting my last (The Snowdrop Garden), I felt cleansed, as a Catholic might feel after a visit to the confessional. Burdens removed, joy […]
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