An Ode to Nellie
My mother was born in 1898 on Merseyside and lived there all her life. She liked her garden,and in the summer months would sit out reading and pottering about, with a “cuppa” always at hand. As she grew older she was unable to tend the garden, so on my many visits from Bideford to see mother I would give the garden ‘a good going over’, whilst mother read the newspaper, usually a week old – ‘just catching up with the news she used to say. I wrote this poem in her memory shortly after she died in 1995, 3 months short of her 97th birthday.
An Ode to Nellie
She loved to walk in the garden,
On a summer early morn
A cup of tea in her hand
And spilling some on the lawn
She would wander around the garden
Thinking ‘what a beautiful day’
The Roses are so lovely
The ‘Queen of Shrubs’ she’d say
She would sit in her rickety old deck chair
And think how lucky to be
Here sitting in the garden,
She was then 95, you see
I would arrive from Devon
And tidy the garden quite neat
And she would think it was heaven
And reach for the tea by her feet.