Lynn’s Garden
Within a garden of overgrown weeds and long forgotten botanicals are Lynn’s memories.
Hidden in plain sight, overcrowded with the day to day wear of growing old and losing time.
Forgetting when the lady from care stops by or if there is dinner left somewhere and how long it has sat in that tupperware frozen over in the icy geological landscape of her freezer. Sheets of ice forming and stretching over more than left over curry or chicken and rice. The quiet sounds of cold thinning and desiccating more than a box dinner or two.
Is it lonely in her mind, I wonder, or does lonliness require a period of recognizance she has lost. Is her mind filled with lists of things at the tip of a tongue never fully remembered. Or are her thoughts like getting to the grocery store but never picking up anything on the list you’ve left on the kitchen counter.
Memory is a delicate thing.
Is her mind like the garden she has outside. Once fasteningly neat, precise, trim now filled with years of tools strewn about, chipping garden house walls, weeds tall like people — a mind alive yet painfully disorganized.
Seeing Lynn makes a heart beat skip at a forgotten item on a list. Or a date misremembered indicating some mark of an abysmal fate or diagnosis.
What if as the garden grows over so does this thing in her mind? What if we tended to the garden and her mind came back again.
Can a mind come back again?
