Collections

 

I don’t know that I’ve ever collected anything apart from memories. I used to keep photo/scrapbook journals until I couldn’t see the point of being the only reader. But is that collecting or hanging on to things? I think I struggle to know the difference.

My family never instilled in me a sense of keeping things, we never had much to keep. I rather like the Maori outlook that nothing is forever and things have a life of their own. Passing objects onto others is extending their life and if things get lost it just means they are moving on to another new phase and you have let them do that. That thought is very useful when you lose something precious or valuable.

 What little my parents did inherit was not really precious or valuable. My mother especially was always looking to throw things out. Including a huge fifteen year old rubber tree that if she’d advertised it probably could have made £40 or £50 quid but instead she took the scissors to it one night and filled three bins for the dustmen. True it had begun to take over my sister’s 8foot square bedroom but, to quote a Bronte sister or three, “I’m sure you’ll agree it was the healthiest bloody rubber plant in all of Cornwall!”

Whenever I see a sorry looking pot plant I always think of mother. 

I have collected seeds from the garden this year. From the various colourful and vibrant flowers that somehow have survived my mix’n’match planting methodology and in this year of global pandemic, the year 2020, when so much has been utter (frankly) shit, plants and bushes have bloomed defiant and proud and made me stand in the early morning light also defiant and marvelling at their persistence. Their resistance.

 So now I have old envelopes filled with resistant flowerheads in a large tuppaware on top of a cupboard near the boiler. Waiting for Spring. Wondering if I will actually manage to use the plastic trays that I have collected from too many garden centre purchases and put these seeds in layers of light moist soil and watch them sprout into living growing forms. And then will they make their way back into the garden? I hope so. 

Otherwise what was the point of collecting them? Or hanging onto them?

 Colin Stevens

 


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