Hello dear ones,
And welcome to today's story.
What marigold hears.
Just taking a few moments to arrive here in the space you find yourself in.
Allowing your mind and body to relax now.
Maybe taking some deeper inhales and exhales.
And when you are ready,
Dear ones.
We shall begin.
Everyone in the Whitmore household knew that Marigold was different.
But no one could quite agree on how.
Her mother said she was sensitive.
Her father said she was imaginative.
Her older brother Toby said she was strange.
But Toby said that about most things,
So it didn't count for much.
The truth was this.
Marigold could hear the sadness inside Broken Fence.
She had discovered this at age six,
When she picked up a cracked mug at a church jumble sale.
And heard clear as a radio.
The faint sound of weeping.
Not human weeping.
It's something more like the feeling of weeping.
Shaped into sound.
The mug had belonged to someone who had drunk tea from it every morning for 30 years.
And the morning they died,
It had been knocked from the shelf by a cat.
And the crack that ran from rim to base was full of that particular grief.
Marigold had put the mug down very carefully and gone to find her mother.
By nine,
She had learned which objects to avoid in charity shops.
Quite a lot of them.
Why she could never walk through the antiques market on Fridays.
And how to hold her breath in a certain way that muffled the sounds.
The way you could muffle traffic noise by pressing your palms against your ears.
She had also learned,
More importantly,
That listening to the sadness all the way to its end made the object go quiet.
She could repair them in a way.
Not the crack,
But the grief inside the crack.
She had not expected this gift to matter much outside of crockery and bicycle bells.
Then she met Mr.
Osai.
He lived in the terraced house three doors down and had not spoken to anyone,
Her mother said,
Since his wife went into a care home.
Came out to collect his post.
And that was all.
The garden had gone to weeds.
And he did not answer the door at Christmas when neighbours brought mince pies.
The afternoon,
Marigold knocked on his door.
She was not sure afterwards what had possessed her.
He opened it and stared at her with the expression of someone who has forgotten what to do with a person.
She opened her mouth to say something neighbourly,
The way her mother had taught her.
Instead,
She heard it.
Not the sadness of a broken thing this time.
But a silence.
A deep,
Ringing silence inside Mr.
Osai.
The kind that happens when someone has gone so long without speaking that the space where words used to be has filled up with a particular kind of stillness.
Like a room that no longer echoes because all the furniture has been removed.
Marigold had never heard that before.
It was not exactly sad.
It was more like waiting.
Like a held breath.
Like something that had not yet decided whether it was grief or patience.
She sat down on his doorstep without being invited.
I'm not selling anything,
She said.
I just came because I thought you might want company.
You don't have to say anything.
I can do most of the talking.
Mr.
O'Sine looked at her for a long moment.
Then,
Very slowly,
He sat down in the doorway behind her.
So they were both looking out at the weedy garden.
Marigold talked.
She told him about the jumbo sail mug.
And the bicycle bell she had restored.
And the time she had picked up an old camera at school and heard it remembering a summer that had happened 30 years before she was born.
She told him she didn't know why she could do it,
Or what it meant.
She told him that the silence inside him was the most interesting thing she had ever heard.
And that she thought it meant something was still there.
Growing,
Waiting for the right moment.
Mr.
Osai said nothing.
That the silence changed.
Very slightly.
It softened at the edges,
Like ice near a warm hand.
Marigold came back the following Tuesday.
And the Tuesday after.
Sometimes she brought her sketchbook and drew.
Sometimes she brought a book and read aloud.
Once she brought her brother Toby by accident and Toby was so uncomfortable that he talked about football for 20 minutes without stopping.
Which Marigold privately thought was very helpful.
On the 7th Tuesday.
Mr.
Osai said.
Her name was Ibena.
Marigold looked up from her book.
My wife,
" he said.
As if the word were a stone he had been carrying in his pocket for a very,
Very long time.
She used to grow things in this garden.
Tomatoes,
Mostly.
She said it was the light.
Marigold listens.
All the way to the end.
The silence inside him did not disappear.
That it rearranged itself into something that had room in it.
Room for the names of tomato varieties.
And the particular quality of south-facing afternoon lights.
And the voices of the neighbours who were,
Slowly and carefully,
Finding their way back to him.
That spring he put in a raised bed.
Marigold helped him plant it.
She pressed her hands into the earth.
And heard absolutely nothing from it.
Which meant she decided.
That it was perfectly whole.
