Charlotte Sommers loved the outdoors. While other sixteen-year-olds were listening to radios, watching movies or dating boys, Charlie preferred to be outdoors. Not that she was even interested in organisations like the Girl Guides, hell no! Too structured. Too rigid. She just loved her own company and the company of Mother Nature. There was nothing she liked more than donning her backpack and hiking through the national park in the hills behind her parents’ home. Her parents were middle-aged when she was born and they never had any more children, so they fulfilled her every whim and forgave her eccentricities.
On one hot summer afternoon Charlie, her nose sunburnt and her bare legs covered in scratches, was exploring the national park’s walking tracks when she decided to take a breather. Sitting on a fallen tree and drinking the last of her water (and wishing she had brought more), her serenity was broken by something that brushed against her calf. Although she loved the outdoors, Charlie had no special fondness for creepy-crawlies, especially creepy-crawlies creeping and crawling on her. She was relieved to see that it was just a small fern-like plant growing in the shade of the log. The fern was no bigger than her hand and consisted of three tiny, strappy, frond-like leaves coming from a minute woody stem. What caught Charlie’s attention was the leaves were gently swaying in the dead calm of a stifling summer afternoon. Fascinated, she took a close look at this marvel in miniature and saw that the leaves were covered in a fine fur, a bit like the Lamb’s Ears that were growing in her mother’s fernery.
The closer she got to the fern, the more the fronds danced until one lightly brushed the tip of her nose. Charlie giggled with delight and decided there and then that she must have this little beauty. Looking around to see that she was not being observed, she used her pocketknife to dig a substantial root ball around the fern and lifted it from the earth. Shaking out the last few drops of water from her canteen, Charlie moistened her handkerchief and gently wrapped it around the root ball. It was a long walk home, but she cradled the precious little thing in her hands all the way. As soon as she got home Charlie lovingly planted the fern of her mother’s fernery, watered it, and then promptly forgot it.
***
Time passed. Months turned into years and years turned into decades. Boyfriends finally came to Charlie. She finished school and moved away from home. Got herself a degree, a post-grad qualification and a highly paid job. Along the way, she found a husband, had three wonderful children, bought a house, holidayed overseas and lived in glorious domestic bliss. And then the divorce came. It was amicable enough; it was simply that as the children grew older, they found they had nothing in common. Over the years they had simply grown apart. This was about the time that her father passed away and despite many attempts to convince her otherwise, her mother simply wouldn’t leave the family home. She would recline in her big, old lawn chair for hours, alone in her fernery, listening to the sounds of nature. Charlie’s fortieth birthday came and went, her ex-husband remarried and fathered more children, and her mother’s health slowly ebbed away.
Being an only child, Charlie took her responsibilities to her mother very seriously and when her mother passed away Charlie found herself in her late forties with no steady partner and grown children that had scattered to the four winds. Although Charlie had continued to hike throughout her life, now without family commitments and with the freedom and money to indulge herself, she threw herself whole-heartedly into her childhood passion and spent time travelling the world and trekked anywhere and everywhere she could.
With her fiftieth birthday a little over a year away, Charlie was back where it all began. Without realising it she had begun to spend more time at her family home in the country rather than her own home in the city. Wi-Fi was good enough that her presence at work was more or less optional, which means that she could do her work effectively no matter where she lived. The country air was an invigorating tonic, and she began to understand her mother’s insistence on spending the last years of her life alone in this tranquillity.
***
One summer evening, Charlie was sitting in the fernery when a movement caught her eye. She looked over into a secluded corner and she noticed a mass of strappy fronds slowly swaying; it was her old friend from so many years ago. It was no longer the tiny thing that she could cradle in her hands though, it had grown to take over most of that end of the fernery, but, strangely, in all the years she lived there she had not even noticed it until now. The fronds danced in the evening twilight and Charlie smiled at her old friend. The watering system her father installed kept the ferns well-watered, but for some reason, her mother always kept a spray bottle in the fernery to spray the ferns; “we all like a drink now and then” she would say. Even though the watering system still worked well, and she had never used a spray bottle, for some reason she always had a bottle of fresh water on hand. Remembering her mother’s words, Charlie said:
“Thirsty, are we?”
Reaching for the bottle, Charlie sprayed the water over the dancing fronds. Immediately they began to dance frantically, writhing in the mist. Smiling, she sprayed more water over the fronds and again they danced. In the failing light, she moved in to take a closer look at her old friend and one of the fronds touched her nose.
“You remember me!”
Laughing, Charlie walked into the house, feeling happier than she had for a long time.
All summer Charlie watched her old friend, talked to it even, and from time to time the fronds would do their little dance and Charlie would spray water into the air, and laughed the whole time. As the summer faded the fronds danced less often and this little bit of fun in Charlie’s life seems to dim also.
***
Charlie moved listlessly from room to room in the house she grew up in. Even though it was almost mid-autumn it was as hot as it was at any time during the summer. Too hot even to walk through the hills she loved so much. As the mid-afternoon sun beat down, Charlie decided that what she needed was a stiff drink and a long soak in the pool. She found herself in the bedroom, where she rifled through her dresser to find her bathers. While getting changed she looked down at her body; years of walking had kept her reasonably trim and her nipples were more or less still pointing in the right direction, but a quick glimpse in the mirror showed that years in the sun had not been kind to her skin, even with all the moisturiser she’d been slathering on over the years. Charlie grabbed a bottle of red and a towel, walked to the pool and poured herself a drink. She took a big mouthful of half reasonable wine, walked to the edge of the pool and dove in.
Charlie sat in the inflatable pool lounge as it lazily floated in the pool and lamented the fact that she left her drink on the table. Another glass would be great just now. Deep in contemplation, she looked at her dark blue swimsuit. When did she stop wearing bikinis and start wearing one-pieces? When did youth slip away into late middle age? Although Charlie enjoyed being alone, she still longed for the occasional company. A decent man now and again isn’t too much to ask for, was it? With a sigh, Charlie paddled the lounge to the edge of the pool and climbed the ladder with considerable effort on her behalf. She walked over to the table where she had left her drink and noticed that she had three messages on her smartphone.
“Damn all mobiles to hell” she fumed, “the world was better off without them!”
This was defiantly not the company she was after. One text is from her son, probably asking for more money she thought. In a moment of reproachful silence, she realised that that was unfair. Ken rarely asked for money and going to college interstate was an expensive undertaking. The other two texts were from work. Even being on holiday and semi-retired, her help was always required to sort out issues that others should be able to deal with. What it was to be loved! The sooner she dealt with the texts the sooner she could get back to her restlessness. With a sigh of resignation, Charlie inelegantly plonked herself down on her mother’s old lawn chair and began to perform her duty to the gods of new technology.
As she worked on her last text, Charlie felt something brush against her hair. She turned around and saw her old friend dancing in the breeze. With a laugh she said,
“I see the hot weather has brought of out of hiding. I’ll get you a drink in a minute.”
The fronds began to flick against her hair and the still damp skin of her back and it felt as if she was receiving a very gently back massage.
“You can massage all you like, but no drink until I’m done!”
The constant stroking of her hair and back distracted Charlie as she tried to compose a text that would firmly tell the guys at work that a holiday meant a holiday, even if one did work from home. With the text finally completed, she got up and walked over to the spray bottle.
“As a reward for a marvellous backrub, you can have a drink.”
Spraying the water into the air made dozens of fronds shoot out and dance in the mist, many more than she had ever seen before. Another spray and the air was alive with writhing fronds. Now that would be one hell of a backrub, she thought to herself. Suddenly a naughty thought popped into her head; on impulse, she slipped the straps of her bathers off her shoulders, exposed her breasts and stepped into the writhing mass of fronds. Immediately the fronds started to gently stroke her breasts and brush against her nipples.