Eliza’s back creaks like an old tree in a storm. She stoops over to pluck a strawberry and breathes in a deep gasp of mountain air. It is growing late but she wants to finish this today. Her son is coming over tomorrow – he promised, after all – and she wants to give him a fruit basket.
The elderly tabby cat winds between Eliza’s legs as she hobbles to the next plant over, leaning heavily on a cane. She thinks about renaming him Underfoot.
“Watch it, Truffles, I want to get to that one.” The cat meows back, somehow petulant, and Eliza pokes him good-naturedly with the stick. He stalks off, tail held high.
The strawberry is bright red, swollen with life, the product of months of careful tending: weeding, watering, putting up nets to keep insects out, and repairing them when Truffles claws holes through the middle. She doesn’t mind. All Eliza has is time.
Done for the day, Eliza picks up the wicker basket and picks her way carefully up the path to the cottage. It’s cold inside. Better to spend her carefully counted pension money on thick woolen jumpers with heavyweight sleeves than on heating bills; it is a philosophy her mother had passed on to her. Eliza follows it because it is a way to remember.
Wrinkled hands press a pen clumsily into a hefty piece of cardstock. The ink spills out bright blue over the page in deliberative cursive: for my darling son.
The note goes in the basket and the basket by the door, ready for Anthony’s visit.
Two days later it sits on the step outside with a different note: please take.
-
