Mavis drops her walking-stick.
Her arthritic fingers tremble after it.
I crane over the fence to sniff a pale pink rose,
so she retrieves her prop
and takes two steps to cut three blooms:
a full-blown one, a bud
and another in between.
"They're not the perfumed ones,"
she gestures at darker, richer flowers,
"but you could put them in a jar."
Her old shoes impress the soil
and she grumbles about oxalis weed.
She prunes a little, but can no longer reach the ground.
"I'm just hanging on," she deprecates,
when congratulated on her work, sustained.
She looks down the bank to her house
which is solid but unfashionable,
perched over the river on prime real-estate.
"They'll bull-doze that, when I go;"
and her eyes study, blankly,
the nursing-home
that's not far off.