Free Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes by Rosie Boycott Page B

on the leaf
     mould, watching Charlie planting bluebell, aconite and snowdrop bulbs and think that when the bulbs started to grow, pushing
     their sweet young green leaves up to feel the sunlight, then my leg would be better. It was extraordinarily calming to align
     myself with the rhythms of nature, which cannot be hurried. All you can do as a gardener is prepare and feed the soil, provide
     the water, see that the light can get in and then wait. For the brief moments that I felt at one with the natural world, the
     panic that seemed to beat incessantly inside me would subside.
    Nine months after my accident, I went into hospital for the five-hour operation. When I came round I was in agony, not just
     from the wires that had been drilled through my bones. There was no guarantee that this would work. No miracles had occurred
     on the operating table to alter Bob Simonis's original verdict. All that was certain was that there was no certainty and I
     had no inner resources to deal with it.

    When I was in my twenties, I studied Buddhism under a Tibetan teacher called Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. With my then boyfriend
     John Steinbeck, the author's youngest son, I'dlived in Boulder, Colorado, where Trungpa had set up a university and spiritual teaching centre. I'd wrestled then with the
     notion of impermanence, which the Buddhists understand as the only guaranteed condition of our lives. All sadness, they maintain,
     comes from failed expectation, from regretting what has happened and waiting for circumstances to change and make you feel
     better. By living with one foot in the past and another in a fantasy of how things might be, we fail to live in the present.
     And that way a sort of madness lies. I knew intellectually that everything in life is impermanent and that all we truly have
     is the moment in which we live, right here and right now. And that it is within our gift to live in that place and thus to
     feel and see all that is fine and right in our universe. But there is a huge divide between understanding something intellectually
     and finding a way to live it. I found it almost impossible to accept what had happened; I wanted to rewrite my story, to make
     it more palatable. Charlie is much more realistic than me, good at coping with consequences and facing reality. Thirty years
     of being a lawyer, of listening to people say, 'If only this hadn't happened,' have bred in him a rare ability to face the
     music fair and square. Now his once determined and focused wife was wallowing in egotistical self-pity, turning his own life
     into a nightmare not of his making.
    The dull winter of 2004 turned into spring and the days were drifting past, like flotsam in the tide. I had no connection
     with them. My life just seemed to be a matter of getting through from dawn till night, lumbering around on my frame, eating
     too much, sleeping too much . . . waiting, waiting, waiting, sentenced to a kind of limbo which would only, I believed, be
     altered by external events. I was still occasionally drinking and I couldn't see how to stop. The long years that I'd spent
     sober felt like a foreign country for which I'd lost the visa. So at the end of May I went to get some help.
    Mr Simonis, who I saw regularly every month, had told me that the only thing I could do for my leg was walk on it. I needed
     to walk a mile a day, preferably without crutches, though using one would be acceptable. The fact that the wires made my feet
     bleed when I walked couldn't be helped; bones need weight on them to encourage healing, the more weight the better. As he
     explained, animal bones mend fast because they continue to stand up and move despite the fractures. The lumps and bumps that
     you see on a sheep's leg are the result of their bodies forming calcium deposits around the breaks. Not pretty, but wholly
     functional.
    I went to get help at a therapy centre in Woking, run by Americans who I instantly trusted. There was a red-brick path