Thursday, May 11, 2006

Rattraps, blue pots, and thoughts about Vietnam

The ratman came and went on Monday. He was a nice young local chap, he laughed at my dorky joke ("I think they heard me calling you because I haven't seen them since") and left behind five or six loads of rat poison bait, in black boxes that must, for rats, look like interesting take-away places. I saw the tiniest mouse busying himself running back and forth between the bait box in the rockery and the stone wall. Shoo, shoo, little mouse, I wanted to say. Shoo. Go away. It's going to kill you, you mustn't eat it.

I bought three concentric terracotta plant pots from a wholesale store the other day. I have been lusting after them for quite some time, as they are each a most exquisite hue of blue. The biggest one is close to two feet across. Made in Vietnam.

(For my generation, even coming as I do from Europe, Vietnam is a childhood word, one you knew about from the news. We were less inundated by images then, and the images stuck more, I think: the naked girl running from the burning village, all that. I remember the war ending. My mum listened to the news and said that a war that started when she was a girl had finally ended. I was around seven.)

Some drops of the blue glaze has been splashed on the inside of the pots, making the inside almost more beautiful than the outside. I looked to see if I could see any fingerprints, genuine signs of the maker. I'm not sure if I just imagined them. But the drops certainly were beautiful. Too bad I'll have to hide them to plant anything in the pots. Somebody in Vietnam made them and spilled some glaze.

© 2006 Anna MR

2 comments:

nmj said...

'Somebody in Vietnam made them and spilled some glaze' - these words should be in a short story! Lovely.

Anna MR said...

Ah, bless, thank you.

But there was a typo in my blog!! The horror, the horror...