He calls her his birdcage junkie. Spray-painted jewel tones, her collection nestles among shrubby mounds of lavender, rosemary, thyme. At first, her new husband grins, bemused. All over the yard little doors beckon. Crowned with gables and onion domes, spires and wooden finials, fanciful shelters meld into vegetation, an echo of young love: a miniature world. A country of two.
Then his health declines. Meds multiply, tamping down desire like weeds snaking through the slender bars of their makeshift Eden. After days of rain she tarries again in the garden, stooping to yank out intruders. The cages lean. Dulled enamel pulls away from the wires the way scabs recede from a wound. Goodbye, Shine.
They both miss their youthful, storied nights, skins fragrant as June. Age and illness canker down like rust, eating through the stoutest cast iron vow. For a while they call it patina. Later, they try herbs, medicines, chemicals—anything, to restore the corrosion of heart, the eroding of home.
Tonight, the eaves drip. Fairytale cages hunker into the earth: a oneness to be cherished. They take hands, walk around the persistent perennials, each bit of life embracing an ingrown cage. Sinewy, stubborn, mystical. They take hands. And walk.
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Laurie Klein is the author of Where the Sky Opens and Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh. A past recipient of the Dorothy Cappon Churchill Creative Nonfiction Prize, she tends a house sheathed in cedar, hunkered among valiant pines braving the latest bark beetle onslaught. The trees are (mostly) winning.