Leaf

 

The daze of anaesthetic and drugs clears over weeks to the daze of just drugs. It’s time to put aside horizontals, rest from the physio exercises now the arm wound pinches, and bravely go on a walk around the nearby streets. Pamphlets affirm this course of action. Carers assure you, you will not return a corpse. Wisest however to sit on garden wall or playground bench every ten minutes. Increased breath rate is a good measurement. Truly, the houses of this district are winter palaces of lengthy cold glass and leonine assertion. Their worlds rise foursquare, porticoes a realist’s dream come true, fences an impressionist’s colour prop. You have not seen them this way before, but then you have not seen them since entering the hospital weeks ago. That is plenty of morphine. They nestle amidst contours of stone and railway sleeper, their magnificent exteriors subdivided in appearance by trunk shades of eucalypt and pine planted efficaciously across firm lawns. Such trees brave cold air that promises rain by tonight, as the saying goes. Your carers are nervous about leaves. You must not step upon a wet leaf for fear of falling and hurting yourself, or ending up a corpse. A walk of length is permitted but be careful of unraked slush. One leaf could be your downfall. Then it would be back there again amidst the anaesthetics. Not that you would know anything at the time. A leaf has remarkable plasticity, matted liquidambars, fiery maples the size of your foot as it steps onto the leaf. Last maples wave teasingly at you from branches. Grounded rain-soaked fiery ones do their level best to catch your attention. Concrete cracks must be watched for unforeseen consequences. Watery eyesight and fuzzy feelings head-high may cause you to trip over a tree root breaking the footpath, just when you thought you were on the mend. Less attention please to grandiose architectural feats in your locale, is the message, more attention on the next step. Avoid resplendent hilltop vistas with breathtaking cloudscapes. Family cars like smooth cetaceans pass by in handsome procession, a beauteous dangerous distraction. Take Panadol. Take your phone in case you go over on a leaf and your carers can then come and pick you up, but don’t go outside the half kilometre radius. You are of earth, which doesn’t mean returning to earth just yet. Return home, slowly, as if age is catching up with you, or you are catching up with age. Slowly enjoy, an improvement on enjoy hurriedly. The leaf, for example, its clear skeletal message at your foot. And the book, dated 1940, or Mcmxl as it likes to put it, at home soon to be picked up and returned to, page 124, though painful to hold due to the forearm incision, so then balanced on a comfortable cushion. Pain is due to nerves reconnecting, as they like to do.