The Itch of Dust

You said it was the coal pits that killed them. Fine dust would itch the insides of their lungs until years later their hearts suffocated. After the first war you’d bury the potato crop over the winter in the deep rich soil. Not to grow, but to hide. Hungry men killed for potatoes back then when there was not enough food to go round. Those spuds were small and tight, not like the fat floury ones you got used to on the other side of the world. But you never forgot the coal-pit potatoes of a small town in Germany.

Years later, after more deaths ate into your generation, you went back for one of those tight green potatoes. You smuggled it in, against the law. It was worth it, you said, just one taste, please. You planted the spud down by the grevilleas and marvelled at how everything grew. The leaves tangled down through the back yard, but when harvest time came they’d sucked the food dry. You always thought transplanting was easy

I know what you went through. It happened to me. I nursed the stump of frangipani in Europe, but it just wouldn’t take. No sand, too much cold. I’d been wrong, perhaps, to lace the soil with my cinders. But that’s all I had. Didn’t we?

The memories eat, take you back to the old days, they itch at your heart and kill off your taste buds, until nothing’s left of the savours of old.

Last month I came back and you lifted the mattock, asked me to go on, begging fatigue. I cleared out the weeds, planted potatoes. There’s no coal here, Mum. No need to fear.

“I‘m too old for that now,” is what you said. “I just feel a texture of itching dust.”