House sitting

Emma's instincts always go somewhere good. The last time she stayed at the house in May she said two things: she was really busy at work, and she couldn’t find the easy piano music she liked playing from when she stayed at Christmas.

I came home to three weeks of weeds growing through the vegetables in the back garden.

I had spent months on the garden: the hardwood beds, the right compost, the watering system – 50 clay pots that leech water under the soil from a small tank filled once a week – the seedlings, the seeds and the pulling up of the weeds.

That was March.

Every day in April I took a toothpick to scratch out the white moth eggs laid into the cabbages, broccoli and sprouts. I looked for green grubs that hatched from the eggs I missed.

May is a bad time to control gardens in Melbourne. Outside work the light is dim at best, leaving you just the weekend to get amongst the plants. It is not enough time to save plants from hungry, camouflaged grubs.

Still, I imagined Emma, immaculately balanced on her high-handled cruiser bicycle, pedalling in the front gate in her placidly thoughtful way, and killing off everything that would stop me from giving her handfuls of sprouts in the winter.

It turned out that controlling the moths would be as easy as not controlling the weeds. Emma let them grow and moths stop coming. It was her own private permaculture party. There were no eggs or grubs when I got back. Everything else survived too, just.

***

It’s three weeks before I fly out and Emma tells me again, this time over dinner at a new restaurant nearby, ‘The last time I stayed I couldn’t find the music I was playing at Christmas. It was great. I found something easy I couldn’t quite play and I just kept practising that one thing.’

I think about the sticky weeds, how Emma can’t let them go to seed like I did last year, and how her winter permaculture would mean permanent weeds by summer. Then I remember – it was a piano version of the minuet from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, in a blue cover. I go home and put it on the piano.

***

One week – and Emma is at my front gate again, resting on her bike, smiling, asking, ‘What are your expectations for the garden?’

What I really want, what everyone would want, is a plentiful harvest of tomatoes and cucumbers for when I come home, but arid maintenance is simpler. ‘Just pull up that weed that grew so well in May and try to prune the vines bit,’ I say. ‘If you don’t plant anything, you won’t have to water anything.’

She does not ask me about Mozart. I go outside and look at garden and know what the plants cannot suspect.

***

The day before I go I give Emma the keys. I show her the battery charger for when the remotes go flat. I show her the one weed, the vines and an area of barren soil I’m hoping the spring will revive some succulent ground cover. ‘Could you water here twice week?’

‘Of course. No worries.’

For all this all Emma can only look forward to a mailbox full of adverts for home-delivered pizza, my bills and a subscription to the New Yorker, and as much of practising Mozart as she can stand. I show her the blue music on the piano. And I promise her a nice dinner when I get home, and any one thing from any country she wants; she finds out about these when I show her a draft of this blog post.

She sums up everything about how things will go in the next six months in the same way: ‘No worries.’ The truth is I don’t have any. Everything always go well when Emma's around, and as she smiles wistfully I hope she will too.

Then suddenly she is on the other side of the closed gate and down the street. The next time she comes, I’ll be gone.