Three flowers dropped from my friend’s bouquet.
I salvaged them for my tallest vase
And as I arranged them for display
I surveyed the friendship of three years past.
Patty had said I must look her up
And I wondered if I should obey.
Thanks for the message. Ta very much.
I’ll choose my friends in my very own way.
Then in came Margie fresh from her walk
To welcome me here was her mission.
We sat on the patio to talk
’Cause noisy workmen were in the kitchen.
That’s how it began, our friendship true.
We let our hair down. We searched our souls.
You brought chicken soup when I had flu.
Which you made between your bridge and your bowls
You read my stories. You bought my book
You praised my cooking, my baking too
My faults you totally overlooked.
It was a pleasure to drop in on you.
Once when there was a power outage,
Wrapped in warm blankets in my armchairs,
We swapped stories of life and marriage.
Good things and bad things and times of despair.
Out walking, we sat by the dam once
The wonders of nature absorbing
And pondering what was there for us
When death, as it must, should come calling.
And when the bad news was given you
You faced it with courage, not complaint.
Then helped by Bev and Jeremy too
You made the most of the weeks that remained.
Three flowers dropped from my friend’s bouquet
As it sat beside her photograph.
Reader, it was not her wedding day
It was there as they read her epitaph.
Bev and Jeremy are her children.
Hazel Bond was a librarian all her life, except for five years exploring Europe when she did various jobs from waitressing in Guernsey, to teaching English (with a South African accent) in Greece to working on a Kibbutz in Israel. She had stories and humorous articles in magazines and on radio in the good old days. She has written a novel which took her 25 years to complete and which she has no intention of trying to get published. She has self-published Filling The Gap (short stories), Wits End (humorous articles) and The World of Susan Cedarbos (poetry) all of which have sold reasonably well but not made a profit. At the age of 79 she has a regular light-hearted column in a magazine for senior citizens which she does under a pseudonym. Hazel married for the first time at the age of 57 and was widowed at the age of 67. She now lives in a retirement village in Somerset West.