living life in your garden

I take out my recycling and approach the yellow banksia rose shrub next to the bins. Three sprigs later, I walk back to my house, and ask my neighbour about the name of this rose again. He tells me it’s native to China, like most roses.

He shows me an outdoor candle holder and asks if I want it for my garden. I decline, citing storage reasons. The removalist truck arrives next Monday and in three weeks he will no longer return to the house he has called home for twenty eight years.

He invites me for coffee in the garden, and I bring some peanut cracker mix over, an array of peanuts coated in mottled crackers, resembling tiny dinosaur eggs.

He gives me another tour of his garden. I keep asking the same questions - what is that plant again? Oh that’s a flowering cherry tree. Oh that’s a lilly pilly tree. Oh yes that’s the apple tree which is still small but which you once picked an apple from for me, a gift I treasured for days before eating.

He picks two lavender flowers for me and suggests I dry them and place them in each of my drawers to keep the moths away. I ask him if he makes tea with them and he scrunches his face.

He loves the red geranium by the tin wall, and as we walk around the kumquat tree, he tells me how Kay told him that there is more Vitamin C in a single kumquat than an orange.

I say: Imagine eating at least one kumquat and jumping on your trampoline every day.

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Imagine a daily ritual so simple it feels like you’re just living life in your garden.

Whenever I remember to, I walk into his garden to eat three kumquats straight from the tree and climb onto the trampoline, reaching my hands towards the clouds.

Some days, I feel tingling through my fingertips like Jupiter in Gemini reaching for possibility and know that the skies want to tell me something.

I suddenly wished I’d came for kumquats and jumps everyday, and I’m not sure if I can anymore.

I climb onto the trampoline and jump up and down. He demonstrates the ‘motorbike’ technique his daughter learned when she went to the trampoline gym when she was six, to suction your feet on the trampoline so you land instead of flying off and crashing into the metal edges.

Extend your arms straight out and squat as you land.

I try it multiple times and feel the bounce of my landing moving through my legs instead. It feels like I am absorbing the shock of velocity through air, like I am relating to the ground with a sudden commitment, like Mars-Saturn on the ground.

My neighbour washed the trampoline eighteen months ago, describing the grime that gathers and rubs off on your clothing. When his daughter was younger, she would always ask him to come jump on the trampoline with him, and they would jump together for hours, switching sides.

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He asks me if I am superstitious about numbers.

A few years ago, he received a letter addressed to somebody else, with the same house number 111A, on the same street he once lived in the eighties. He decided to take the letter to recipient, and as he approached the house, he realised with shock that it was the exact same house he’d lived in.

He had forgotten the house number till that moment.

For the third time, he is moving into a house numbered 111A.