November 14, 2017 - The absent gardener

        The roads were familiar still, as they are to someone born and raised in a small hometown that has been away for decades with only the occasional visit home.

        I slowly eased my old Lincoln between the stone walls flanking the driveway and parked.

        Bordering the length of the stone walls were lush, green ferns with a touch of yellow and brown.  The fronds danced in the soft breeze of the golden autumn sun.  They were still lovely if you mentally erased the weeds peeking out here and there.   

        I calculated the gardener had been absent over seven years now as I stepped out onto the drive. I noticed mowed weeds and grass instead of crunchy gravel. Exactly as Daphne Du Maurier’s had once written:

“Nature had come into her own again and little by little had encroached upon the drive with long tenacious fingers.”

        My heart sank as I took a sweeping glance at my parents' home.  Gosh, it looked like an abandoned house, not the loving nurturing place of my childhood.

        I walked up the front walk now grown over with weeds from the gardens on one side and the lawn from the other.  I paused.  Oh, yes, my brother had mowed the lawn. In his rushed life, he had at least been able to attend to that at the same time attending to full-time care of our aging mother, but the rest, had been left to Nature.

I paused at the re-grown Rhododendron that Dad had cut to the ground.  The plant had disobeyed and was now chest high and looked perfect at the corner of the front walk.

        I stepped out onto the spongy lawn skirting the velvet-moss covered walk that edged the focal point of Dad’s front garden.  The raised brick garden under the bay window was a mass of weeds and I could identify a few hangers-on.   Dutchman’s breeches here and there and the grey-green, soft leaves of the Rose Campion had escaped the garden and infiltrated the lawn.

        I walked towards the front step garden where now, unknown perennial plants had succumbed to weeds that clambered, and sprawled out past the dislodged drain spout.

        With the warm sun on my back, I turned and walked silently around the house. I noticed what I believed to be woodpecker hole damage to the upper eave on the end of the house and I walked to the back yard to see the rest of what was once a beautiful landscape now in ruins.

        The stunning blooms of the hydrangeas in their full fall glory surrounded the rotted steps and broken boards of the summerhouse platform.  I moved away and continued to the back entrance stone steps that were overgrown and now too dangerous to attempt. I stepped back on the lawn surveying the bed of Dad’s Bleeding Hearts and red Peonies.   Only the dried leaves and stems remained as testament of his vigorous plants.

        This was not really an abandoned house, as it looked to all passersby.  This was merely the result of an absent gardener.

I’ll take care of it now, Dad.

NOTE:  Pictures taken from the internet.  I didn't have the stamina to take pictures of Dad's gardens in disarray.

This essay is the result of a recent trip to my parents' home and this months Writer's Club Prompt:  Abandoned building or Abandoned house.