Royal Pains

It’s raining softly here today, and the valley is quiet except for the protestations of cows who are methodically being separated from their calves. We love the rain and the clouds, but there is an uncharacteristic sad feeling in the very air. And time is passing much too quickly.

There is some Alanis-level irony in the fact that the squash we so carefully planted in the garden has done poorly, but one lone “volunteer” plant that sprang up, probably because of a bird depositing a seed, in a bed of shrubs bordering the back porch. This one unintentional plant has provided enough good squash for several meals so far, and is still bearing. The blossoms looked luminous in the grey morning light.

Speaking of luminous, the blossoms on the morning glories that are growing around the property are lovely in their symmetry and their hardiness. The farmers call it “bind weed” and for good reasons, but I enjoy the beauty of the patterned colors

Note how the darker ones seem to glow from within with a self-manufactured light.

The peas continue to do well….Mrs. Orr has picked several messes of them (in fact, we will be having some for supper tonight) and they are still producing.

We did notice, though, that something has been after the peas. Three or four mornings arrived to show the pods left behind by the intruder.

Yesterday, we spotted the interloper. He is a sleek rat, crafty enough to outsmart my initial attempt to kill him in a large rat trap. So now I will bait one of my small Hav-A-Hart live traps and see if this does the trick. Bluebelle, since spotting him for us, has spent many hours on the back porch peering into the overgrown garden area where he seems to be homesteading. He is become deft, destroyers of pods.

The tomatoes are mostly petered out, but we gather one or two every day or so.

We planted late, so the okra (okry, actually) isn’t as far along as we had hoped, but it seems healthy and sturdy. There are many small pods developing on the plants, and they continue to blossom. The flowers remind me of the cotton plants of my youth, which is apt, since the okry is reportedly related to the cotton plant.

Not only has the newly-arrived rat been bedeviling Bluebelle, but the many squirrels in the backyard have driven her to wild chases every day. Jinx, more of a cattle dog, usually watches with bored eyes when his sister lights out after one of the bushy-tailed rodents. But sometimes he offers a helping paw if he is so inclined. They love to tree the squirrels in the maple tree near the garden. The squirrels then sit in the branches and fuss while whipping their tails into arcs and S’s.

Bluebelle has been the dog of dreams lately. The other morning, my wife had a bad dream. I heard her whimpering and moaning as she slept, and I reached over and jostled her in order to awaken her. She was grateful for my intrusion and said that she had been dreaming that Bluebelle jumped up on the bed and bared her frightening teeth at her and was preparing to attack her. This morning, I dreamed of Bluebelle, too, but mine was not a frightening dream. In mine, an old friend named Ken, whom I have not seen in years, had stopped by to visit, and we had a nice long visit. At some point, we looked outside and realized that it had been snowing during our chat, and the snow was now at least knee high. “Hang on, Ken,” I said. “I”ll go get my snow shovel and cut you a path to your car.” But when I looked outside, Bluebelle had already fetched the shovel and was pushing it, with handle up over her shoulder, along the ground, walking on her hind legs, and was plowing a path to Ken’s car. I woke up laughing. What was that the dinosaur wrangler said about the lethal velociraptor in Jurassic Park? Clever girl.

Speaking of dogs, one of our granddaughters recently presented my wife with a pencil drawing of our late, beloved Dixee, which she drew from a photograph. I think she truly captured Dixee’s personality, especially in the very alive eyes. She comes by her talent honestly, her mother and father both being gifted artists.

***

This past Friday marked one year since the death of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, and the ascension of her son, King Charles III to the throne. I have been reading and thoroughly enjoying an autobiographical work by the English mystery writer, P.D. James. The work is, as I’ve mentioned here previously, a diary that she kept for an entire year during 1997-1998. Mrs. James had an eye perceptive enough to probably make people who knew her squirm somewhat, and reading her take on other individuals is not only entertaining but also highly instructive.

She made several diary entries about the death of the late Princess of Wales, Diana, whose demise occurred during the course of the year Mrs. James kept this diary. Her descriptions of her impressions of the Princess, of the Royal Family, and of the people in London’s reaction to the situation were so spot-on, I wanted to quote her here:

Sunday, 17th August

I read the Sunday papers with little enthusiasm. Do the public really care about the antics of the Princess of Wales and her lover? Then to 11 o’clock Mass at All Saints, Margaret Street, where Prebendary Gaskill preached on death, an unusual choice of subject. He touched on the last rites. The thought that the last physical sensation of a Christian would be the touch of holy oil on the forehead is seemly, but I wonder how often that happens in practice. Death, after all, seldom comes when invited or by appointment. We are likely to take our last breath, whether peaceful, gasping, in pain, or mercifully unconscious, in a place we wouldn’t have chosen. And even if our loved once have managed to manoeuvre their way through the traffic and have avoided hold-ups on the motorway to arrive at the hospital in time, essentially we all die alone. They will see us but we shall not see them. The most I hope for is a sight of the sky…

Sunday, 31st August

I was the first up this morning and heard the news of the death of the Princess of Wales as soon as I turned on the radio for the 7 o’clock news. My reaction, which must have been shared by millions, was disbelief, as if the natural order had somehow been reversed. Death has power over lesser mortals but not this icon. It sook a few seconds of listening to the newscaster’s sombre voice to realize that this wasn’t a carefully contrived publicity stunt; this was reality, horrible, brutal, ugly and final…After lunch at the Swan, Francoise and I spent most of the afternoon and evening watching the BBC tribute. It is never easy for public figures to react appropriately at short notice to such a tragedy. Well-worn adjectives begin to sound like a mantra and the reiterated tributes seem fulsome and platitudinous. I thought that the Prime Minster was impressive, the Archbishop of Canterbury inadequate. The most moving tributes came from ordinary people whom Princess Diana had met, sometimes briefly, who spoke of her warmth and her loving concern and who obviously felt that they had a personal relationship with her This, I imagine, would have pleased her most. The process of beatification was well under way by the end of the day and will no doubt continue. There was something so horribly appropriate about the manner of her death, and I have the feeling that we were all involved in a Greek tragedy with the whole country as the Chorus. Beautiful, willful, complicated, destructive and doomed, it is hard to believe that she could have found happiness. Her comfort was always in the love of strangers and, if she most wanted that love to be intense, personal and universal, today, at least, she would be satisfied.

Wednesday, 3rd September

The flower stall outside St. Mary Abbot’s Church had set up a trestle table with a huge pile of tissue paper and there was a continuous sale of flowers to people on their way to Kensington Palace. This extraordinary festival of mourning is like an infection. It is oppressive and poignant, but also alien and disturbing. I have a feeling, uncomfortable and irrational, that something has been released into the atmosphere and it isn’t benign. The real woman has become smothered by acres of plastic and decaying flowers. The crowd was extraordinary. The women — and the great majority were woman, many with prams or toddlers — walked, eyes fixed with a kind of desperate intensity as if afraid they would be late or were on their way to the first day of a sale. They didn’t communicate or even look at each other. One could almost believe that an official edict had gone out that flowers must be laid within three days on pain of condign punishment. There is a growing and disturbing animus against the Royal Family whose reticence is clearly neither understood nor sympathized with. I shall feel relieved when Saturday is over.

Friday, 5th September

The Royal Family seem to be giving way to pressure from the people — which of course means pressure from the tabloids — to show their grief more publicly. It seems outrageous that the bereaved should be expected to come down to London publicly to collude in what is increasingly seen as a self-indulgent, almost neurotic display of emotionalism. But it would have been wise if the Queen had spoken briefly on radio and television to say that it was right that she should be with her grandchildren at this time, but that her thoughts and prayers were with all who were grieving, and if the Duke of York and Prince Edward had returned to London at once, perhaps to meet some of those waiting to pay tribute. Today there was a curious atmosphere in London composed of unease, expectation, and grief. The carpets of flowers are growing before Kensington Palace, St. James’s and Buckingham Palace, and people are already settling down to spend the night on the funeral route. There was a spell of heavy rain in the afternoon, but a clear night. In the evening I had supper with Harriet Harvey-Wood, now retired as Director of the Literature Department of the British Council, and her mother. Harriet had shopped in Kensington High Street and said that it was virtually impossible to get out of the Tube trains because of the pressure of people on the Underground platform — all carrying flowers. Mrs. Harvey-Wood, now over ninety, found the public emotionalism particularly distressing. Her generation, which has survived two world wars, is stoical in grief and mourns in private. And for what exactly are people mourning? I suspect for themselves.

Saturday, 6th September

I spent most of today until evening watching the funeral on television. It was an extraordinary, indeed unique, event. Apart from a brief preliminary wailing when the gun-carriage first appeared, the crowd was very quiet and the half-feared demonstrations of anger never occurred. For me the most poignant moment was when the young princes, with their father, Prince Philip and Earl Spencer, took their places behind the coffin at St. James’s Palace. The fact that the boys could manage this walk before thousands of onlookers was a tribute to their fortitude and self-control — qualities which are are not much in fashion. I was glad that it was so sunny. London — the parks, the trees, the buildings — looked very beautiful. It was extraordinary that the whole funeral could be so well organized and so perfectly carried out in just a week. The Abbey service was a successful compromise. I thought that I would find the Elton John song obtrusive but it seemed appropriate; this, after all, was the world in which the Princess was most at home. There was applause both outside and inside the Abbey for Earl Spencer, but I thought his attack on the Royal Family was unnecessary and misguided; the wrong words at the wrong time in the wrong place. I wonder if those sad, mascara-laden eyes will droop in reproach for ever over the House of Windsor, or whether this media-fueled emotion will burn itself out as quickly as it has arisen.

Monday, 19th January [Mrs. James was in Dallas, Texas, on this day, on a book tour]

The interviewer, like many others, asked about Princess Diana. Why wouldn’t the Queen grieve? I was tempted to point out that, had I been the Queen, my grieving, though sincere, would not have been excessive. Instead I said that not everyone showed grief by pinning teddy-bears and flowers to the railings of public parks…

For myself, I remember clearly the day of Princess Diana’s death. I had heard about it on the radio while driving to a church service. The service was a dour Presbyterian affair, during which the twitchy, prissy little pastor spent almost an hour dissecting the minutiae of some obscure passage in Leviticus. I do not know if anyone else benefited from this lecture masquerading as Spirit-filled preaching, but I know that for me it was an abysmal waste of time. After the service, I was outside chatting with a couple of the members of this congregation and said, “Did you hear that the Princess of Wales was killed in a car wreck? The men stared at me with faces like laboratory blackboards, and one of them, a prim, lipless little fellow whose personality practically screamed “Please give me some vinegar to drink!” sneered, “I don’t listen to the news. And I certainly don’t listen to it on the Sabbath.”

Mrs. James descriptions of the media-enforced Rules of Grief reminded me of something that I find repellant in American culture. Any time a teenager is killed in a car wreck or other such misfortune, the deceased’s classmates gather outside the school or the home in an ad hoc vigil, hugging each other and weeping into each others’ hair…and usually glancing over at the television cameras to make sure they’re being captured in their moment of Profoundest Grief. And the Dear Friend will be forgotten within two TicTok videos after the funeral.

And now I will leave you with a bit of music from Tanya Tucker, and bid you a restful Sunday, my friends.

~ S.K. Orr