Letter from my terrace in Palma 8 Two peacocks and a rose bush

                                                                             15 September, 2017

Two peacocks and a rosebush.        

The city of Isfahan in the south of Iran is known as the city of roses and nightingales.  But this letter is not about Isfahan, and peacocks replace the nightingales though peacocks would not be out of place in Isfahan either. The peacocks and the roses in this letter are nearly a thousand miles apart.

The two peacocks escaped from the garden of a cottage by the river Wye  near a small town on the border between Wales and England. This town has a fine castle and a beautiful bridge that was built in the year before Jane Austen died.   The garden was pretty and the peacocks were well fed and cared for.  They were kept in a large pen before being entrusted with the key to the door and allowed to wander to other parts of the garden.  But peacocks, it seems, are proud birds and they decide whose garden they will beautify.  They can be bought but they cannot be owned.  One sunny morning these two left their garden near the river and made their way up the hill to a large nursing home in a grand old house that had paved terraces and wide lawns.  In the nursing home lived people with dementia.

One afternoon I was walking by the cottage and noticed that the peacocks had gone. 

“Where are they?” I asked the man who had brought them there and taken care of them day after day. 

“They are up at the old people’s home,’ he said.  ‘They must have delusions of grandeur or perhaps they just feed them better there!’

“Are you going to catch them and bring them back?”

“No.  I will let them stay. As they strut around the lawn in front of the windows, they will make the old people happy.”

As far as I know, they are still there today.

The rose bush is in a small village in the cold province of Soria in the north of Spain. There too is a home for old people.  A cottage near the home had been bought by someone who was tired of the traffic and hubbub of Madrid and came at the weekends and in his summer holidays to grow a garden. He had planted herbs for the kitchen and oak trees to shelter the cottage from the winds that blew across the open fields in February.  By the road was a rose bush. It started to bloom in early summer and the flowers continued until late in the autumn.

‘You have a beautiful rose bush here by the road,’ I said.

‘Yes, I planted it for the old people to look at when they come along the road in their wheel chairs,’ the man said.  ‘The roses will cheer them up.’

The roses of the summer on this bush are still in bloom and should last for a month or so more unless the freezing winds from the mountain of Moncayo come early this year.