She readies the tomatoes & radishes fresh lettuce leaves & green onion then finishes with salad cream as a garnish & puts the evening’s fish pie in the oven
The salad sings sweetly to her of the bygone days of childhood summers fast cars on winding country lanes, the way her grandfather would say
something to his sheepdog & watch it rush away again in the sunlight’s warm grasp, before the rain
wandering fields & farms or out by Thor’s cave always with a pair of binoculars for counting birds & bats
& how he’d sleep in his armchair in a red brick stack of a house & how the dazed garden air always smelt of tea roses
many years have gone past & she keeps all the old photographs under lock & key in Europe & old birthday cards in their envelopes
Every Christmas the phone rings out above a coal-filled fireplace & the call goes to the answer machine all that love gone to waste
* Thor's Cave is a cave in Manifold Valley in the county of Staffordshire in the UK