Grown With Love

Des had nurtured his relationship with Hattie but he hadn't reckoned on a garden pest!

-  Manon Gandiolle.

DES had been waiting for a dry day to pick his raspberries.

"It's a good crop this year," Hattie called across.

She was leaning on her spade and taking a breather in the middle of lifting her onions.

"A bumper crop." Des showed Hattie a handful of red berries. "I was going to put some in a container for you."

"Yes, please." Hattie nodded. "I'll swap you for some onions. I'll leave them in the cold frame to dry off first."

This was the usual way with Des and Hattie. They'd been gardening on their next-door allotments for five years and had spent countless hours there together.

Both single people, they had become good friends and were always swapping produce.

In fact, they had even begun to co-ordinate who was going to grow what, to maximise the variety of fruit and veg between them.

Hattie checked her watch.

"It's half eleven already.

Tea break?"

"Why not?"

Des left his picking bowl beneath the raspberry canes and joined Hattie on the bench outside her shed.

She poured tea from her purple flask into a pair of pink enamel mugs and got out her travelling cake tin, which today contained homemade brownies.

"Delicious!" Des shook his head to suggest that the word didn't really do the cake justice.

Hattie laughed.

Des noticed how lovely it was that the fine, earthy dust that had settled on her face while she was digging accentuated the laughter lines around her twinkling blue eyes.

The two of them sat companionably in the early autumn sunshine, as they had on so many occasions through so many seasons.

"Penny for them, Des?" Hattie asked.

"Oh, it's nothing," he said a little too quickly.

"Are you sure? You've been a bit quiet lately." Des swallowed.

There was so much he wanted to say, so much he had rehearsed in the mirror at home.

Now the actual moment had come, he knew he was going to bottle it again.