It Never Used to get Like This

Minutes go by this way and the old man doesn't move. The only sound in the room is the sporadic pop and hiss of the dying embers in his log burner. Eventually, he sighs and says,

'Never used to get like this...'

The Luminous green moss caked right up his garden gate, on all of his fence posts, and even on the disc displaying the family name in an indulgent, ornate font has been needling him for weeks now. He moans to me about it most days.

I study his eyes as they flit around the scene outside the living room window, to which he has lovingly tended for almost forty years. They don't settle on anything and appear to be single-coated in still-drying eggshell vulnerability.

Without warning, the profundity of his assessment comes crashing down, flattening me like a Looney Tunes villain. I shuffle over and join him by the window to share the view of another grey, mild December day.

Whether he has registered me or not, it's hard to say, but he mumbles, 'Just needs a good frost... that'll get rid of it.'

We watch two wood pigeons drinking from a water feature that is now almost entirely green; so much so that chunks are coming loose to make way for new layers. Perhaps we both just yearn for it to look like it does on the Christmas cards.

I know the frost he waits for might not come at all this winter. If it does, it might be the last for a very long time, and I have to think that on some level, he knows that too, but he's at the far end of a road on which I'm still gridlocked. From where he is, under the Calpol pink sky, and mountains you can reach out and touch, it's harder to remember what it felt like back then, when there was more to lose.

Eventually, I sit him down, get him his paper, and check he's got everything he might need until the carer can make it over. She has my number if she can't.