Freedom to travel. Not anywhere in particular. Even going up the track or down the road invites caution, even fear. I never knew that before, and nor did you, pre covid. It limits. A man sawing a fallen tree, a walker, a passing car that halts to expend greetings for health and well-being. All that breath. Anyone who turns towards me, even a metre or two away, brings a shrink. I can feel it. And it works not naturally with me. I halter, falter, dither and the questions in my head look like a wealthcome of a nervous system, as I always see in images. I might have said Spaghetti Junction but I will not, because that place is all about finites and endings and beginnings we can actually see, however lost we may become during the dive into its complex depths and twists. This is different. This is confusion and random chaos. This twangle diverts and complicates and migrates and deviates in an attempt to founder our race, to bring us to our knees. We can run to books on wisdom. The dictionary; Roget’s thesaurus; innovative books written in their times that yet speak truths we understand, for they still apply. But this is Dante’s Inferno, for us, now.

I miss being able to text or call a friend and to know I can meet them for lunch. I miss inviting them up for a glass on an evening when the clouds are arguing and the light is fabulous and I just want to share the whole kit and caboodle with someone who shows me light in their eyes and give me laughter from their mouths. A sky shared is a sky affirmed. It is not the same just me doing this affirming thing.

I miss saying, on a moonlit night, meet me half way. I’ll bring the wine. Lit, backlit, by Mother Moon, the single track is elevant, guiding. I find my way, as I always have. I miss sitting on a wet mossy settle and not minding at all. I miss singing songs way out into the night, across the sea-loch and out and up into the sky thinking that maybe our melody actually. meant something.

I miss seeing basalt rocks and knowing that once they were lava and sharing that. I miss the ordinary meets I always took for granted; young mums, school collections, high fives at the salad counter . I hate the fear.

I’m not going to schwack in a ‘fix’ there. I’m just saying what I miss.

However, since I wrote this, life has changed, shifted dynamic, opened her arms and whispered Come. I am coming, I am, despite my fear and all the things I miss. Although I don’t miss returning to a home inside of which I am the carer, I miss that role. It was my absolute, my resolute, my desolate. It was something. I was important, no, essential, and that essentiality was reality. It was exhausting, infuriating but it was mine, my life. Funny how when all of the tears and tares are gone, the man or woman gone, we headers for 70 or 80 find ourselves spinning in a space we never knew existed at all. Speaking recently with a good friend who is the lead actor in her own life drama, I remembered the thixotropy of what was once for me. I see she might, although this was just in my mind, be longing for release and I felt my hand on the brake. There will be relief at first, yes. Then, at some point just when you think you are flying high and wide, your wings of longed-for freedom lifting you above the clouds of your recent skies, will take you too near the sun of your joy and you will melt. There will be a fall. There always is.

These ridiculous summer days on the west is best wet wet wet of many months, the mornings begin cold. I light the fire and pull on a jumper. By midday, the sky is changing her mind about the whole wet wet wet thing and she opens her mouth to let the gunfire blast out like a million happy thoughts verbally described. She has words in there I cannot keep up with, so astonishing is the change, from gloom to something like a beach party on a beach in Jamaica, all music and a barbecue that will burn all night. The change from dark cold to warming light is eluctable. The birds flit, the sweet peas hold tight and lift. I see them lift. The sun-followers open their petals in a nanosecond, drinking deep of sun food, sun nourishment, sun happiness. Although tomorrow may begin like a teenager in a bad mood, there is this hope of midriff change.

As we who know what we know wander through our days of either caring or its outfall, we must understand that it is inevitable we find the boots for the new. Actually, it might not be boots at all. Might be barefoot, a new barefoot. Might be, will surely be, finding the courage to step out as a single when we left single behind us many decades ago. It isn’t an easy process. What process is? We might be old, feel old, look old but we are not done as long as we understand this, in the words of Martin Shaw ” Scales don’t fall off. You have to scrub them off and it hurts. A lot.”