Bluebell Weeds

I thought they were weeds. They were in my front garden, leaves first, and I thought about pulling them. If I’m being truly honest with myself, I hardly entertained the idea. This was because, years ago, when I bought soil and pots and seeds, the end result was devastating because instead of a raspberry bush I’d grown a large weed. My eldest sister pointed it out and therefore, I was in huge denial for a long time, continuing to water it, with some suspicion. This reminds me of how some reptiles and birds will sneak an egg of their own into another nest; pushing their burden on another, ignorant mother, killing off the true kin. Sneaky shit nature is. So when I saw the leaves of the bluebells, I thought it was another weed that I didn’t want to be involved with. We’d had our battle and I’d lost.

Near where I lived- well, a while to walk but a short drive- so the definition of near is really up to you in that instance, was Blean Woods. This near was in relation to my old home, now I live in London where woods are parks and parks are spaces people go to see grass. Blean Woods, the woods near us was spiritual. When I think of it I think of how the sun kind of hangs in the air and the trees kind of droop and the whole place seems like a new world. I think it is a place a lot of people come to to have everlasting memories. Because the best memories are when you are surrounded by beauty, or at least it is the most photogenic moment for a moment to take place in. The dogs loved it because of the wild grass they could leap over, families cherished it because of the quiet and the mystery; my mother liked it because of the bluebells. In fact, I completely forgot it was even called Blean Woods and if it wasn’t for a quick internet search to refresh my memory of it’s beauty, I would have been calling it by her loving nickname “Bluebell Woods’’.

I don’t remember much about it, only that I went there once with my family, maybe I was 14 or 13 or delusional because I could easily have been 16 or 9, and we went searching for a geo-box. Geo-caching is where you hunt for hidden treasure. I believe we found one that was hidden 20 years ago or so, if my memory serves correct although it is fairly assumptive and arrogant. You take an item from the hidden box and replace it with your own, and then you add your name to the list of many other adventurously nerdy, Zelda-loving (or something of the sort) that came before you. They truly are useless trinkets, which serves as no real reward, but the sense of achievement you get when you find a dirtied tupperware, full of crap and old names, is phenomenal. Especially if you crawled through natures waste and dirtied your hands and face fighting leaves and tearing down the homes of spiders in the hollow of a tree to retrieve it. My family don’t do it anymore.

In spring the bluebells woke up. And you could walk beside them as they stood, their faces in the sun, saying hello. It was what my mum had been waiting for, and wishing for before she went; I was told this after. She wanted to see the bluebells in Blean Woods rise up and greet spring once more before she died. Now, I think that is quite sad but at the time it was achingly romantic with only a sparkly tinge of sad. Usually time adds romance, but in this instance it has only stripped it away. Thinking about this, I wandered outside to my present concrete front garden that hosts a very minimalist amount of soil, pushed to the outskirts of our square, just like the other houses that line our street, looking onto the road that is usually flooded with cars like salmon down a busy stream. I thought they were weeds, but they are bluebells, spilling up through the soil, some laying there purple cellular heads, with there whisker like threads onto the concrete. I picked one. They don’t smell of much. They remind me of cancer a bit, they have these throbbing bean like flowers mounted on top of each other. I wonder if those beans will open up. Of course they will, I corrected myself looking at a picture, because the beans will droop and fall and you shall have a massacre of beautiful flowers on your hands. But right now, they look like a collection of clustered tumours, spreading out to each other trying to soak up the sun and possibly even corrupt it too.

But she was waiting for them to bloom and walk amongst them once more. We’ve definitely visited since, but there were no bluebells that day. I didn’t think the soil wrapped around our special concrete would be very furtive, but I am wrong again. Blean Woods was named after its rough ground. So I guess bluebells like it rough, they like a bit of a struggle; they go through the hard shit so they can bloom.

Another thing someone said before she died was that she was waiting for her youngest to turn 18 before she went. She was a mother to 7 girls. Of course she had no choice in the matter. Fortunately, Lucy and I (my twin sister) had our birthday beside her in her hospital bed. As 7 women we said goodbye to her months later.

She died in June. I hope one of her selective ventures outside with her husband near the end was to see her flowers blossom as she had patiently waited for before her part in this world came to an end. I hope she was happy and content when she saw it, I hope it was laced with some magic and some hope and I hope there was a comfort in the fact that it would still be here after she was gone and that the bluebells might remember her sitting there, grateful she said good-bye to them so that they wouldn’t be waiting for her every year from then on. I’m glad she saw them blossom and she could hopefully sit in that peace, that they’d be okay for a while now that they had been coaxed out by the sun, and were able to stand alone, showing the full force of their matured faces, ripe for adventure and ready for adult life. She left on the 23rd, which has now only occurred to me, she saw all of spring, the rise and fall of the flowers and even the new season blossoming.

How do we heal knowing that the ones we loved lived their lives only too see others bloom? In that, I think she stayed a bud whilst we all flowered.

I was worried about the approaching June; the early heads of the bluebells on my London doorstep had shocked me. They had served as an invitation, beckoning me forward to the Kentish wood. On that day they whispered what I already knew, what I’d already sworn to myself that I would go and do. So today, I will walk forward and traipse across the rough soil and stare at the buds in all their glory and I will think of my mother, eagerly waiting for this first day of spring to come, to witness what she had witnessed time and time again. And I will wonder where she had gone to when she sat amongst them. And I found that she wasn’t in the flowers, but shining brightly, in the sun. And I made a promise to myself that each year I would sit, and wait for the blossoms to come.