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By Eithne (Eithne) on Wednesday, April 17, 2002 - 10:12 pm
Ok here's my first attempt, I'll post the second version tomarrow, I just wanted to get something up on time. As always, I waited till the last minute to start this and now I don't have time to finish it tonight. Version 1, third person, now in the present tence, then in the past tence. The water stings Opals hands as she first plunges them into the scalding dishwater. There is only a few dishes to do now that she lives alone, and it only takes a couple of minutes to wash them, unless she lets them pile up, which she rarely does. She notices the smell of the new �natural� dish soap she is trying for the first time: Lemony, but not the usual artificial lemon oil smell-this smells more like herbal shampoo with lemon balm in it. The smell reminds her of when she first moved into this house, over forty years ago, and discovered that there was Lemon Balm growing all over the yard. Of course, she had no idea what it was at that point. It looked like mint, but smelled just like furniture polish. She bought three books on herbs before she finally identified it. It was an old world herb, native to Eurasia. The name (shorted from Balsam) came from the Greek word for bee, if she remembered correctly. The English used Balm to treat just about every ailment known to man, and once it made it�s way to the New World, the Indians used it to sooth sour stomach and to cure rheumatism. The book said that if you drank a tea made from balm everyday you would ward off the effects of old age, become smarter, remember everything, and never go bald. She still remembered that line all these years later even though she had only made tea out of the herb once (she didn�t care for it), and thought of it every time she yanked more of the invasive herb out of her flowerbeds. She�d even tried steeping some in her bath once, but the lemon furniture polish smell reminded her too much of cleaning house and made relaxing difficult. She never did find a practical use for the Lemon Balm, but had always given it space in her garden all the same, it just seemed so important, and it was pretty. Other plants had come and go but the Lemon Balm had always been there. Opal washes the last dish; it�s the mug her husband used to have his coffee in every morning. She uses it as a vase now, not being a coffee drinker herself. She takes it outside to the garden and fills it with a large bunch of Lemon Balm, some Rosemary for remembrance, some Parsley for love, some Rue to heal the pain of ones lost and to ward off evil, and a sprig of Cypress, the tree of death because it seems appropriate. She places it on the little table on the porch and remembers something else from the book, �It was said that to mend a broken heart one would carry a pocket full of Balm buds for the whole of a month�� |
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By KateC (Katec) on Sunday, April 28, 2002 - 10:22 am
I like the way you took advantage of the way a smell can trigger a whole string of memories, and the part at the end, where she's filling her husband's mug with herbs, has such a sad, wistful quality, and then at the end, "It was said that to mend a broken heart one would carry a pocket full of balm buds for the whole of a month..." It's amazing that we both wrote about gardening, and Sarah wrote about Opali blossoms, and you wrote about a woman named Opal. |
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