Barry Rosenberg

Women my age who’ve become widowed, and whose kids have moved away, appear to have little problem entertaining themselves. Pilates. Clubs. Organised tours. Tiny dogs.

For males left solo following decades of coupledom, it’s not so easy, and often Trev and Morrie are left without any real sense of occupying healthful mind-time. Oh sure, there’s the proverbial backyard shed; golf and fishing are also big in these parts.

But when my beautiful Anita succumbed to the evils of cancer 21 years back, not particularly shed-handy, loathing golf and being vegan (thus I don’t eat the fishies), I spent heaps of unproductive time sitting on my keister thinking useless tape-loop thoughts, mostly trying to make sense of why the bastards (whomever they might be) took her and not me, 20 years her senior.

Loneliness hits hard for those who’ve been long-time coupled.

Was I thus fortunate that Anita and I had been but a few years together prior to being torn apart?

Perhaps, because after a period of self-pity I more or less kicked loneliness out the door.

But its sneaky offsider, boredom, became my major foe simply because it’s the easiest emotion to bullshit yourself about its presence.

One day sitting on my deck working hard to convince myself I wasn’t bored, I took note of the large empty space of my property between house and the beach.

My OCD said: it’s called a garden, stupid; now go do something about filling it.

A city boy who’d never stuck his fingers in soil, I started with vegetables.

End of season I had carrots like wooden sticks. Pumpkins with tendrils that ran halfway to Fiji while forgetting their prime purpose was, er, pumpkins.

Greens that created snails so fat they hardly fit their shells.

Combine such ineptitude with the fact everybody and their dog grows veges around here, and folks seem to make a religious rite of showing up with buckets of home-grown produce to share.

Then one day at a local market someone was selling punnets of flowers for a buck apiece.

I stood gawking at their magnificent colours, the variety of petal shapes and sizes.

I’d heard about men highly successful in various life endeavours suddenly walking away and growing roses.

They’ve lost the plot, I firmly believed. And here’s me carrying home half dozen punnets.

Not long after beginning to plant straight into the ground, I saw I was creating a problem: they were all at the same low level to my sight. (I do abhor uniformity.)

The beach being full of debris, I took to dragging logs of various lengths off the sand, across the reserve and onto my patch.

I plunked them at varying depths in the turf just off the deck. I now had high poles and low poles, fat poles and skinny poles, placing upon them a diversity of containers, most of which I painted.

At present I have around 70 scattered about, including four rescued toilets. I’ve never needed to purchase a single pot as people are forever placing unwanted receptacles curbside for the taking.

Now, flowers have names, right? Mostly I don’t know these names and even less do I care.

Do the flowers themselves give a toot what we call them? And then there are the geniuses who whip out their phones, place them just over a pot and bring up a plant-naming app. I mean, really, people? Just enjoy.

These days when not walking or cycling I spend major time sitting on an ancient sofa upon the deck.

My entire lateral vision is taken up by the magical flow of gorgeous flowers.

Concert Programme playing in the background, book in one hand, cuppa in the other, I am cheered by these beautiful friends along with the gentle orchestration of bird calls and nearby surf.

A damn nice way for a solo fella to grow old.