2023-10-15 04:25:53
The day is splendid. In a few days, maybe two weeks, the ampelopsis once once more covered the entire wall in front of my window, climbed the wall that divides my terrace from the neighbor’s, and is climbing the back building like a skilled thief. It would be a dream if one day it manages to cover that ugly white mass that took away the winter sun and makes my eyes hurt on the hellish days of summer. That behind there, instead of cement breathing down my neck, an angry green wall exploded.
I love ampelopsis. Since I have these in my patio and surrounding the window I can follow their cycles minute by minute. It is beautiful to see how they sprout when they are peeled and the warmer days begin: dark red buds, the same color that the leaf will have in late autumn, before falling off the stems.
These days I was looking for tutorials on YouTube to reproduce them, it is quite simple, I hope it works out. The entire garden is radiant, I look at it from the upper floor where I have my desk, spreading over the floor or climbing the walls, different shades of green, the purple of the stems of a plant that in my town we called black canilla (quite racist ; we also called the timbó black ears…) but it is called colocacia.
At one time my mother worked as a nurse in a sanatorium. It was a modern building, built especially to be a health center; I think it was the first private health care center because until then everyone, poor and rich, had been treated at the town hospital. The rooms of the sanatorium overlooked small, glazed internal gardens, where these black canillas grew, enormous, vigorous, with leaves of an enormous size. Until now, in my yard, I had never seen them of such size once more.
I was admitted to the sanatorium for only one night, when I had tonsil surgery. I remember slowly opening my eyes, vision blurred by the anesthesia, and seeing those beautiful plants with their leaves almost turned towards the glass as if they were looking at me. On the nightstand, the surgeon had left the tonsils in a jar so I might see what he had removed: they were two bright red balls, they looked like Christmas puffs. At night, when my mother turned off the light so that I might sleep, I stayed for a long time with my eyes open looking at the stems that were as dark as the night and yet glowed in their own darkness. My mother was on call so she went in and out of the room, she monitored me like another patient until early morning when she came and lay down for a while on the visitors’ couch. My mother was very thin and her jacket and skirt uniform looked bad on her. She always said that sometimes they would admit some dirty old men and the old men would try to grope her. I imagined that men were really green and they caused me both wonder and contempt at the same time.
That time I had surgery I asked him if there was any dirty old man in the hospital so I might go spy on him. My mother laughed and she told me no, luckily there weren’t any. But a few days ago twins had been born. One was with the mother, but the other was too small and they had him in the incubator, so we might go visit him if he wanted. I put on my slippers and we walked hand in hand through the empty hallway, it was early in the morning and the coming and going of people had not yet started. The baby was smaller than any of my dolls. The hand, the fingers, the nails, everything was perfect but tiny.
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