Flourish Magazine: Spring Calls by Beth Kellie

As part of each issue of Flourish Magazine, we release digital content alongside our free print magazine, on the Artlift and Yes to Life blogs. This is often content we couldn’t fit into the magazine’s limited pages, or film and music, but that we loved and wanted to show the world.  

This issue of Flourish Magazine was on the theme of the ‘Body’, with submissions from those living with or beyond cancer received through an open call for creative responses to the theme.  

Read the print magazine online for free here

Spring Calls
Textiles and Words by Beth Kellie
Shards of sunlight filter through the shutters and its silhouettes of daybreak dance delicate shadows on the bedroom wall. Atop the dresser in the corner, the pirouetting ballerinas of the Peace Lily, are illuminated in the faint amber light emerging around the doorframe. Today’s sunrise wakes me and extends an invitation to waltz with the quiet tranquillity, that is unheard of at this time of the morning, in my house.

My immediate thought is that it’s Sunday followed by the usual pummelling of anxious thoughts. I slow my breathing and adrenaline as the psychologist taught me to and seek out cool patches on the soft cotton sheets, immersed back into my body. I stretch out from the imprint I have made and get up.

Slowly, slowly, tiptoeing softly, I hush my feet on the stairs and along the wooden floored hallway, to enjoy the morning before life wakes with noise and people and reminders of chores that should have been done the night before.

Stepping out into the warm morning air, I marvel that Spring has thrown her flowers across the garden, despite the lack of attention it has been paid. Smatterings of daisies, clover and buttercups decorate the luscious grass. The dark soil flower beds, still damp from months of rain, are efflorescent with Bluebells and Hyacinths bursting through the daffodil stems that need cutting back. Pink puddles from the candyfloss blossoms of the cherry tree garnish the lawn. The contrast to vivid memories of mornings spent in stark white hospital rooms, with plain scrubbable walls and artificial lights, is palpable.

As I sit in the lounger, I feel Spring’s soft breeze on my exposed arms, tinged with a slight chill. I observe her ripples across the newly opened leaves on the apple trees bordering her playground, plum-full of blossom. Her small gusts carry the scent of the ruby-red roses and I inhale their perfume. It gives me flashbacks to the acrid smell of antiseptic that hurt my nose and the air conditioning vent over the head of the pullout bed that they couldn’t switch off; how it blasted arctic air that chapped my lips and gave me a cold. It wasn’t a proper bed meant for sleeping anyway, just somewhere for terrified parents to be, the constant beeping of alarms hostile company.

In my garden I take time to study the curled leaves of the pear tree, my 40th birthday gift from before he was ill. I find the tiny pear buds a battlefield of swarming aphids desperate to escape the ants devouring their prey and protecting the tree. How do you treasure life whilst contemplating death?

The faint haze over the azure sky overhead draws my attention; a beautiful ocean streaked with feathery wisps of clouds that glide past as I imagine they whisper their secrets to the sun; the sun, the radiant sun in all her glory gifting me the warmth of Spring.

Sunday morning. Just a Sunday morning in the garden. But it’s not just a Sunday morning to me. This is the first Sunday in over three years that I do not serve a pill-pot of chemo and other toxic drugs to a boy still small enough to hold my hand in front of his friends. I water the garden with my memories before rising, ready for the day. Today it’s time to give this new life a whirl, to embrace this new season and work out how we emerge from this cocoon anew. Because now, Spring calls.