Instructions In The Cauldron. Serena Longhi Gelati
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It’s better to love each other than wasting time and energy in useless wars”. To cut it short, they were just like that…What does Alison’s mum do to be a hippie? Have you ever seen her?”.
“She dresses up exactly as you are saying, she’s very beautiful, always smiling, with long blonde hair and she wears a pendant with a glittering white stone”.
“It’s not glittering!” I interrupted her.
“Yes, it is. It looks like a white rainbow!”.
“Rainbows aren’t white” I pinpointed.
“It might be a white Labradorite”. Granny got up from the armchair, she moved to the casket where she kept her stones and took one light stone out of it.
“Exactly, granny. That’s it. Have you got it too?”
“I’ve got plenty…they keep me company and they help me”, she said, keeping turning some of them between her fingers.
“How can they help you? They’re just coloured stones!” I burst out defiantly.
“No, Anne, they aren’t just coloured stones! They are much more and I’ll let you know them, when you grow up a little more. If Alison’s mum doesn’t before me…”.
“What are our plans for the weekend, granny?”.
I already knew actually, it was March, the weather forecast said it would be sunny, so we were going to get the garden ready to receive spring.
Life at our cottage was marked by season changes: we carved pumpkins at Halloween, at Christmas it was a triumph of decorations, with evergreens, cakes and candles…it was absolutely our favourite time of the year! We usually spent most of the time at home around the fireplace in winter, towards March we got the garden ready, at Easter we decorated eggs and we spent the long summer days outside, barefooted; our granny picked up lavender, sage, rosemary and mint in order to dry them and we went back to school in September, but just after we had prepared some jam!
“We’re going to the plant nursery, girls: we’re getting new mould, some nice little plants and some seeds; then we’re going back home and we’re putting the garden in order. Mrs Bray is coming too”.
“The lady who lives next door? Why?”
“You see, Anne, even if she lives just on the other side of the fence and she has got the same sunlight, the same shadow, the same rain and the same ground as I have, she can’t make even a daisy grow in her garden. She’s always hoping I will tell her my secrets!”.
“So why don’t you?”, my sister asked her naively.
“Because I haven’t got any. Flowers and plants are living beings, they stay with whoever they want to and they need to be fed, not only with water and manure…They need energy as well”.
“Electric energy?”
“No, silly girl. The power of our mind. We must think about what we are doing when we plant them, to instil our trust, thankfulness and also our desires into them”.
“Alison’s mum has put a fairy house in her garden. She says they are going to help her to make plants grow”.
“I wish I could know what kind of plants is Alison’s mum growing…”.
“I can ask her, if you wish”.
“No Sarah, it doesn’t matter, thanks”.
“Have you seen them, granny?”.
“What?”.
“Fairies!” my sister exclaimed, as if that was something obvious.
“No, darling, I’ve never seen them”.
“Because they don’t exist!” I claimed lofty.
“Anne, not all we can’t see doesn’t exist. I’ve never seen the Great Wall of China, but I know it exists”.
“Of course! They have taken photos of it, it’s real. Nobody has ever taken photos of fairies instead”, I replied, crossing my arms on my chest.
“Because they don’t want to and they show themselves only to the people they choose”, our granny explained.
“I don’t believe it”, I finished.
“So you’re never going to see them…”.
“I do believe in them instead, granny!”, my sister said.
“I had no doubts about it”, our granny burst out laughing.
“In fact I believe Mrs Bray should buy a nice house for them and put it in her garden, so they can help her grow plants and flowers”.
“No, Sarah. Mrs Bray is not the kind of person who believes in fairies”.
“So”, I suggested, “she should just talk to them. I heard in a documentary that plants react very well if we talk to them”.
“That’s true, my darling. It’s exactly like that”.
I really couldn’t believe plants could hear us, they didn’t have any ears! But it was worth trying.
“Look how your little twins have grown up, Susan” , squealed Mrs Bray the day after. “You’re lucky you can see your little- daughters every week. My son never brings mine here. By the way, you’re their maternal grand-mother, you know, you are the favourite one…”.
Our paternal grand-parents lived actually on the Balearic islands, in Palma; they had got tired of the English weather, so they had moved down there when they had retired. We saw them once a year: they gave us plenty of presents, but they didn’t even know our teachers’ or our friends’ names and they sometimes still mistook our names.
“So, tell me, which of you is Sarah and which is Anne?”.
We stared at Mrs Bray with our big light brown eyes, my sister and I were completely different and in an absolutely voluntary way. Sarah had long blonde hair, she was thin and angular. On the contrary I had shorter dark hair, like my dad’s. Nobody ever mistook us.
At the plant nursery, Mrs Brady never left our granny even for a moment; she was her shadow, she kept asking stupid questions: “How much water should I give the roses?”, “Where is it better to place the chilli vase?”, “How long will rocket take to sprout?”, and so on, all the time.
Granny answered her kindly, giving her lots of advice.
“Oh, Susan dear, you really know everything! How can you?”.
Our great-grandmother Maggy had taught her everything, not only about gardening, but also about cooking and knitting. Her works were famous all over Marlow, her best things were scarfs, pullovers and pot holders, all of them strictly purple, violet or pink.
“Knitting helps me relax. The colour which makes the mind calm down the most is really violet”, she used to claim.
She completed her works with some drops of lavender essential oil, then she gave her creations to her friends as a present, or she took them to the Charity shop at the end of the street.
Lavender oil was never missing at home; it had helped me a lot when I was a small child and I couldn’t get to sleep: I remember my granny used to put some drops on my temples and my chest, then she used to massage it, telling a nursery rhyme three times:
“With lavender oil and the moon in the sky, shall my little girl have a quiet sleep tonight”. So I could sleep all night long.
“Granny, do you believe Mrs Bray’s garden will be as beautiful as yours this year?”, my sister asked, placing carefully some vases along the outside wall of the house.
“Oh Sarah, I hope it will, for her, since she spent a lot of money at the plant nursery. You know what I think: you should only take what you need. There’s no use of having lots of kinds of flowers, if you can’t deal with them or lots of different herbs if you don’t use them and you don’t know what to do with them. That’s why I only keep the necessary ones; lavender, sage, mint,