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| Bougainvillea glabra - 12 November 2026 |
Today my
eldest daughter Alexandra cameo very early to supervise the fixing of my
outdoor bedroom window of which the frame had been pecked away by a woodpecker.
Had I waited until the spring water might have come into my bedroom. The cost
of the repair was$1500 and we almost laughed when my home insurance company did
not include woodpecker damage in my policy.
My cat Niña
was in terrible shape. She would not come down from our room because she does
not remember Alexandra and she was most upset upstairs because of the noise and
the presence of two men outside the window.
When everything
was fixed I settled with Niña on the bed. It was then that I noticed that
Rosemary’s Bougainvillea glabra (in a
pot on small table by the window) was blooming in one of its branches. I knew I
had to scan the flowers and I knew exactly what I was going to write.
In English
we say “to remember” and in Spanish we say “me acuerdo”. But there is a much
more beautiful expression popularized by Jorge Luís Borges- “estoy rememorando”.
Its root is memoria for memory.
No matter
where I go, where I walk, where I drive, what I look at in my home, in my
garden I immediately see my Rosemary in my thoughts. When the two repairmen
were gone and I was with a finally relaxed Niña right next to me it was
impossible for me not to notice with my peripheral vision the spot that
Rosemary occupied on our bed. Her absence I call her absent presence.
Today I
decided to wash the bedding and the pillowcases. When we used to do this we would
then get into the tub and wash our hair. I would help Rosemary blow-dry her
hair and then we would get into bed (nothing on in the summer) and gallivant with
our bodies.
Alone this
was a sad affair. I knew that writing about it would give me a small relief.
I seem to
always return to this framed SX-70 Polaroid of Rosemary which is one of the
earliest I took her when we arrived to Vancouver in1975 and rented a little
townhouse in Burnaby. The Polaroid languished in a shoe box for many years.
When I discovered it saw its value. The frame is in our guest bathroom by the
kitchen with many other family snaps.
