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| Verbena bonariensis - 7 October 2026 |
I am not sure it is a seasonal problem. In this last
month I have not written quite a few blogs and I tell myself that I will write
them on the next day.
Perhaps my situation is one of finding it ever more
difficult to live in my isolation where I miss the presence of my Rosemary who
was always there for 52 years. I cannot tell people of this problem, and
sometimes I think my daughters do not understand. The reaction to my telling of
my melancholy is what I call a thought stopper. I wrote about that here.
I feel guilty about having my blog holes so I am
trying to fill in the gaps. One easy way is to scan a plant from the garden.
Invariably, since our garden was joint one, it is easy to write something as I
will connect it with Rosemary.
Today (I will not reveal the date so I can plunk this
blog in the space of the missing ones) I cut this plant which is originally
from Argentina. It is hardy in Vancouver and Rosemary first made me aware of
it. It seeds itself and comes back every year. I somehow think that part of
Rosemary is present in these as she first put them into the ground of my back
lane garden.
Because I was never too swift it took me years to
finally figure out (this happened when I took Argentine nostalgia photographs
with Juan Manuel Sánchez at the end of the 90s) that to have a nostalgia for a
place you had to be somewhere else.
Now I have suddenly come to understand that this
verbena is a double nostalgia. It is my nostalgia for my country and my
nostalgia for the absent presence of my Rosemary.
The closest I could ever get to that feeling when she
was alive, would happen when she would visit her mother in Ottawa or our eldest
daughter in Lillooet. In one occasion I was very depressed as it was my
birthday and Rosemary was visiting Alexandra in Lillooet. The doorbell rang and
there was my friend Leslie Dala. It was August 31, 2020. He told me he wanted
me to take him to my piano room. He then played all of Bach’s Goldberg
Variations.