Lamma Island, 2:08PM – Muggy.

Entry 145

The landlady and I make amends. In private. I promise again not to plant bamboo.

Never have I thought so much about soil, good soil, and where to find it. We are surrounded by jungle. Soil is all around. But first you must uproot trees, overturn rocks, and downgrade shrubs before you get the soil, before you begin digging it all up with your fractured shovel rejected by the community garden.

It helps to have a functional wheelbarrow to move the soil. Otherwise, you must have herculean strength to lift your dysfunctional wheelbarrow over the three steps you never think about that lead down the narrow path to the plot of land just before your building.

The landlady has a reedy laugh. She watches me struggle to tip the wheelbarrow onto the plot of land. Forty years ago, the landlady says, the people who lived on this land left and were never heard from again. Stone walls remain, as does a stone floor below forty years’ worth of fallen leaves, dirt, and detritus. She does not say that last part.

How long have you lived here, I ask, vaguely recalling she once told me she was born in Aberdeen (not Scotland). I moved to this island when I married my husband, she says. I must have been in my early teens. She sounds uncertain.

What it must be like to be at a stage in life when your husband is gone, and it has been so long you don’t exactly remember how old you were when you married. You were a teenager after all. And now you’re pushing eighty. The fields are tilled over and filled in. The stone house you raised your children in long torn down, new cement houses stand where the rice once stood, and now you have foreigners renting rooms, planting decorative plants, demanding explanations as to why you chopped that tree down. An accumulation of many small changes over many long years. Yet there must have been moments, difficult ones, where it felt like now would never end, that now would be forever. Were there? I want to ask the landlady. Something stops me.