This is the gnarly old rosemary in the common area of the garden that Mr. Boulder pruned. The week after that we went to a garden center and got the dill, lavender, sage, thyme, sweet marjoram and Thai Basil we planted around it.
On our first walk he had suggested to me a book he had encountered previously called The Complete Language of Flowers A Definitive & Illustrated History. I bought a copy and it is like catnip for me. Catnip with very small type, but still…
We looked up rosemary and the folklore around it as you might imagine is robust. I used this all as the launch platform for a poem I wrote this week. There has been talk of a shared tattoo of a botanical drawing of a rosemary. He has an unfinished sleeve on his left arm, and he wants to add a bunch of vines and flowers into the mix, and he could add the rosemary in there.
He met a tattoo artist whose brother he helped in prison who is willing to finish his left arm for free. If this comes to pass, I will get the rosemary in the center of my upper back under my collar line. This is all to celebrate his first month of freedom.
Yesterday he met in person his 26-year-old son. Said son is about to become a father, which makes Mr. Boulder, yes, a grandfather. He was intensely anxious about this meeting. He has not lived with his son since the boy was seven. The whole thing is apparently both crazy exciting and terrifying. He wants so much to make this work.
It takes a village. He is most likely starting his first real job on Monday and then his priority is to get out of where he is staying now and into a real apartment or shared house. Finding a place as a released felon is not easy.
All this stuff eclipsed me spending much time with him this last week. I did see him yesterday, we took a bus together and sat next to each other during the first half of the dialogue group meeting. Hugs were exchanged.
In the meantime, I have been on an emotional roller coaster to the nth degree. Sweet and painful and confusing as all get out. Like the weather, changeable by the hour.
We are having lunch on Sunday and going out to the celebration of Walt Whitman’s birthday that Walt has set up. He has dragooned Mr. Boulder into participating. I am not a big fan of Walt Whitman but people I care for are, so…
It has been raining and is just letting up now, so I am off to the store as a means of procrastinating on some League stuff and to provision Carlo (who is sadly getting pickier about his food the older he gets).
The plan is to walk with Mrs. Sherlock tomorrow morning. Her friends are making a lot of demands on her as she has been recovering from surgery and I am not seeing her as much as either of us would like, and I am happy for this opportunity.
I think it is more her widowhood than her recent bout of cancer that is driving all these friends to be grabby, especially in terms of wanting her to travel. She has a bike trip in Italy planned in August that she is conditioning for and later in the year she is going to New Zealand and possibly Australia.
Not me, I am here writing poems and finding myself completely unexpectedly smitten. And astonished that it was even possible to feel this way again.
I am so blaming it on the rosemary… and the Elf King, but that is a whole other story…
Loading comments...