Author: judyfairbairns

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Island Blog – A Tawdry Spin and Miss Rose

When standing before my minute but ferocious execution teacher, Miss Rose, I might have matched her height even though I was twelve and she many twelves and counting, I was diminished by her power and knowledge. She was so confident, standing there just above the floor with her fingers pointing, her arms working, no fear of taking up space. I wondered, even then, if she had wanted to be on stage. She would have been someone noticed and that’s for sure, but back then beauty and elegance was all the fickle world of theatre wanted unless you wanted to play Bottom. Nowadays, there is more room for character actresses. I say Actresses because Actors could get away with no end of compromises to their body and still be taken for a chance. Let’s see how you act. Not so women. I am happy it has changed. Back to the point.

El-oo-si-date! She annunciated at me from behind the desk that dwarfed her, her whole body shouting at me. Not a shortened ‘oo’ but a loooong one. I did that, forming my lips into a ridiculous fish pout. Better, she said. Go again. I also remember the word snow. You must round on the O, she said, like this. And did the O thing with her own shaky old lips. I heard her, wanted to please her, wanted to be the best. I noticed I was standing on tippytoe as if my height could alter anything. Relax your heels, she said, without looking. She just felt what I was doing and could hear it in my voice. Even then I was marvelled. How did she know? Well, she was passionate about her work, that diminutive woman in a sensible frock that never showed her knees because knees meant something dodgy, like an invitation and she was of a generation that thought that way, or, at least, her parents did. Did she have parents? I could barely imagine them. Was her first name Rose, or her surname? I never knew, never asked. I just brought my heels down and practised enunciation for hours.

I did win the elocution cup. I recall the thrill of it, that being called up to the stage, a grass stage that Shakespeare would have known well, the parental audience flanked in rows that spread all the way back to the headmistress’s office with its big light-wild windows. She, the headmistress was also both diminutive and powerful and all her dresses forbad knee escape. Did they have knees these women, these women with all the heart longings and losses and confinements we know today but now have the ok to talk about, as they did not? I may forever wonder that and in that wondering send back a great big hug. But with that freedom we now have, that chance to speak out and to be taken seriously, there is still the old cover-your-knees thing in our thinking. Who among you has not wanted to step out in something a bit different to the ‘brown’ functional clothes you once wore? Who has not wanted to show her knees and more? I understand why so many young women go crazy with their clothes for a night out, I really do. There is something blood red and fire inside each one of us that is so easily extinguished for ever.

Oh, the point……trust me to forget that. Rein in you blood red and fire woman with knee issues.

I walked the doglet to the old pier, the skeleton and I know that the old sea dog is now just that. I wonder how it is inside that coffin. Of course I do. So much not to bother about in that safe case. Just let go. The old pier, my husband, is diminishing now. He would have hated that, but he is not here to do the hating thing. He had a big problem about letting go. I pick up a feather, divided into white and black, and wonder which bit of Goose this came from. Not a wing feather, not a kill, just a shed. Ok. We walk on, the doglet watching my every move, ahead of me, looking back, behind me, following up, always there, always right there. We pass Scabious flowers and watch honey bees (who’s?) and two peacock butterflies, blue, eyed-up, blood red, letting me watch the beauty of them as they go about their work. The tide is outing, the oystermen at work across the inlet. We sit awhile and the doglet keeps vigil. Actually, I ignore her keeping vigil thing because it is relentless. Every single sound alerts her to ‘vigilling’. I begin to swing back to my watching, curlew, gulls of many a hue, oystercatchers, a seal, the flip of an otter, the indecision of the tide. Still she alerts. Turning, eventually, (a tawdry spin) I see a young woman coming across the seagrass. She hesitates and I welcome her. We talk. She is French and on holiday. She wants to explore. Can I guide her someway? I do, with my heart right in it. She smiles, thanks me for my ‘direction’. She understands me, she says, because my English is proper.

God bless Miss Rose.

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Island Blog – Fractal Dance and Twee Storms

I leave my little home and swing right onto the Tapselteerie track. There are no cars parked in the wheen of a passing place so that means no walkers unless they arrived on foot. Good. I love solitary walking. As the sea breeze lifts and luffs around me I get a faceful of wispy down, seeds from the rose bay willow herb, white, soft, fractal. I don’t take a deep breath as the cloud floats around me and away into the sky. Thistles are also setting flight their hopes for the future, and this down is hardier, more able to land with a modicum of precision. The cloud down can blow on for days, weeks, at the mercy of a capricious breeze, ever changing its direction over this land of rocks and tides and capricious breezes. I have found cloud seed everywhere, inside the house, in the bird food bins, stuck to the washing on the line, in my knicker drawer. I’m not hopeful for them. I catch some seed and study one. Aeronautical perfection with tiny limbs, one weighted and with a tiny barb for holding on. The seeds spin like tops through the air, catch on clothing which then travels home with the wearer only to be shaken off in a new garden. Nature is genius.

The Tapselteerie track is dappled mosaic. Sunlight creates a masterpiece beneath my feet, a work of art. As I walk over such beauty my eyes lift up through the canopy of hazels to a mosaic of cerulean blue, bright green and icewhite, then back down to golden hexagons, polygons and all the other gons laid out before me like a star studded carpet. I hear long-tailed tits somewhere in the density of woodland, warblers and the prrrt of a robin’s warning. Two herons flap and screech at each other on the shore, vying for territorial rights. They lumber and flap, crashing into bowed-back hazels as if nobody ever taught them how to fly with elegance and precision, as if they still have dinosaur blood coursing through their veins and the wing thing is, well, awkward. The tides are both very high and very low just now because of the full moon, the Sturgeon Moon. The full moons were named by the ancients, called to reflect the season. How sensible. Not like the naming of hurricanes or storms which always scoffs me. A twee name for a disturbing natural eruption of astonishing energy tells me much about how our current culture really isn’t taking life seriously at all.

The tappsled seaweed is flung across the rocks in a sort of gay abandon. Gold and copper, black and emerald against the black of the basalt and I wish once again I had brought my phone for a photo. No matter, myself says. You can just take it in through your eyes, feel it sink into your body, your mind and your heart and by the way who on earth goes for a walk in the wild with a phone? Good point, I concede. My sensible self, my let go and shut-the-hell-up self is often right. She is all about just enjoying the moment or, if the moment is a shit storm, then not enjoying it at all and just waiting until it moves on to the next moment. It’s a good ethos.

The oyster farmers are working across the narrows now the tide is low enough to walk across from one side to the other at such tidal times. Their puffing tractors work the shore, the men in full body wellie boots as they tend to the cages. I wonder what they need to do and how hard the work might be, probably is. In sunshine weather it must be easy, in sharpening bite-cold, not such fun. The oysters are the best I have ever tasted and we can enjoy them anytime we choose. The shucking shed is big and green and sometimes I can hear voices floating across the search as the men and women work. I can hear laughter, jokes shared and it reminds me of working on our farm way back in Norfolk, way back in the 1970’s when I first learned that being part of a ‘waulking’ team was the warmest and happiest I ever could be.

Deer can swim over the narrows and we did warn the new owners of Tapselteerie once we heard they were deer fencing the estate. Don’t bother, we said, the deer swim and nobody can deer fence an entire rock-solid shoreline. They didn’t heed us. I remember wondering back then if my heeding skills might be due an MOT. Now the fences sag and flop anyway and the deer go wherever they please. Once I watched a stag leap said fence, startled by me. My heart was in my mouth as I watched him head for the impossible. I envisioned broken limbs, damage, wounds and general disaster. What actually happened was that he cleared the fence but his back legs caught, bringing down the whole thing as if it was matchwood and string. Once the clanging and puffing and snorting and leaping and heart-in-mouthing thing was over, he stopped, looked back at his awaiting hinds, all shivering and silent on the ridge above him, above me. I drew respectfully back quietly, my eyes down. Make no eye contact, I remember that lesson in Africa and it makes sense to me. No eye contact, no challenge, no threat. With nervous steps, the 3 hinds descended the ridge, stopped once to look at the not-looking me and the not-looking dog clamped under my arm, and then elegantly flowed over the matchstick fence, up, up and away into the trees.

These sunshine days are a gift. The winter is long enough, loud enough, scary enough with twee named storms causing danger of death which is very real for some. We have lived with storms and disturbing natural eruptions for thousands of years. The problem is dissociation. Instead of connecting with what is way bigger than us, way more powerful, we are hiding. And, thus being fools. I know I am fortunate, living high enough on these old rocks to avoid flooding and all the horrors that brings to bear and I am glad that my husband was overly alert to nature’s power along with her gifts. He taught me to be vigilant, to be aware, to make sudden decisions based on what was plucking at his gut and not what we heard on the news which, sadly, is often too cautious in its decision not to cause panic. If we as alert and intelligent human beings felt confident enough to decide for ourselves, what spirit would come to life! What powerful and intuitive choices would be made, what influence that might have, and how many lives could be saved! These are not questions.

All this on my dappled seed blown walk today. Let us, people, learn things, like CPR, like what happens in a tidal flow, a flood, a storm. From what direction? How much build up is there, considering the friction, drag and density of that tidal flow. Tidal spiders, taken into account. The earthly tides flow widdershins but not always. I am not saying that everyone needs to know what the tides are doing but I am saying learn something. You might live in Glasgow or Stevenage. No matter. You will be affected by the tidal flow and the altercation that is going on between the heavens and the earth. And it is real. We must teach our children. We absolutely must.

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Island Blog – Transverse

Not the same as Traverse, but pretty similar in the depth of itself. One, the ‘traverse’ thingy is about zig-zagging through difficult terrain, the other from the Latin (I was so good at Latin) referring to a beam that supports two other things that require supporting. Sounds like a marriage to me. And the Traverse bit is what we do inside a marriage because, let’s be honest, when the first fire of attraction has fizzled out like a Catherine wheel or a rocket and it’s cold out there and the embers are dwindling like embers do, we are both facing ‘traverse’.

I think we all expect a fairytale. Although I might be tempted to respond that there is no such thing, I cannot. I am definitely a believer in fairies, in magical, in angels and all the other dodgy beasts on the other side of that coin. At times it can feel like I am down with the dodgy and then something, or someone, lifts me into the world of ‘happy’. I have lived long enough as a fairy with dodgy pulls to know that this is life. This is my ‘traverse’. If you relate, then you will know. The problem we have is the Blame Ground. Ach, I know it well. It is bloody and rocky and without water for many miles. This ground can claim you, sorry, me. It can seduce.

As I am now wandering in the traverse, those endless miles of absolutely nothing and a load of absolutely somethings that bite and nip and trip and flounder me, I find myself seeking out a transverse, that lode bearing beam that links, that makes impossible possible. Okay it is with hindsight but who says I cannot achieve this now? Maybe that house on the hill that we built, the one that stayed standing but flooded us out, can live again. The more I age and the more I look to the future of the next lock keepers on life, the more I let go.

And as I do, even as I cannot see any future, I rest and just watch the sunset, the gift of it, gilt, and backing with a full moon, antsy and blue and commanding, and I chuckle.

Time I did.

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Island Blog – Not like a suitcase or a door

Today I wake in the lime green light of absolutely not dawn. It thinks me that the Morning is pregnant, nauseous and letting me know. I groan. I want the buttery light that tells me is it at least 4.45am. Then I can close my eyes quick quick like a camera shutter and count the minutes all the way up to 5 which is the time chickens, babies, outside four-leggers and garden birds leap into life. Then I will perform what laughingly passes as my own leap, although I need to be cautious and one can hardly leap cautiously. T’is an oxymoron. But this lime-green morning light groans me. I had awoken oft in the dark because that flipping Barn Owl was having a party all alone on the telegraph pole, screeching insults or whatevers mere feet from my open window. I got up and gave it my best glare but all it did was that 360 thing with its head whilst its feet remained affixed to the pole. I won’t yell, I whispered, nor throw my Ponds cold cream jar at you but only because of your astonishing beauty and this irritating sense of privilege I am feeling that you chose my pole on which to screech like an old fishwife.

So passed the night and now I am flagging. Actually, if I’m honest, I flagged all day so that at this hour of the very long assemblance of hours I consider myself a high achiever in the world of flagging. I didn’t do nothing, though. Not at all. Doing nothing is so not my thing. In fact, I sometimes wonder if my not doing nothing makes me too busy to allow internal troubles to make some sense. It’s like I am ‘busy’ shutting out anything painful when I know only too well that ‘we’ must allow the pain a voice in order to heal. I tell myself that and myself usually snorts. She knows that understanding something we have read, and that makes perfect sense, has to travel a different route to actually click. I sweep the floor, very sloppily. I answer an email and work some more on one of my ridiculous fantasy landscape tapestries. This one is particularly ridiculous but I have thought that before now as I work without pattern or design only to find a rather lovely scene enfolding before me. My eyes are squint from sewing today and the rain is non-stop. I eat breakfast at 5.30 and lunch at 11.15. I am like a tortoise preparing for hibernation, going slower, s l o w e r s. l. o. w. e. r. From time to time I whack myself into startlement and we do something like go for a walk all coated in rain repellent plastic. Well, I was, but the doglet, newly shaved, was not and she decided after all of 14 feet that this was enough thanks and I’m off home now. It took me 15 minutes to get all this clobber on. Well, that’s okay. Another fifteen minutes to take it off and that makes 30 minutes which is half an hour which means the day will soon(ish) be over. Thank goodness.

I go back to thinking about the thinks I avoid thinking. Let them come in and overwhelm, says myself. No, I say. I cannot allow that. I don’t want to let that tsunami in, that one that has multiple shipwrecks inside it, smashed and broken, ruined and unrecognisable. I want to do this closure nonsense, putting everything, my life, my experiences, my marriage into a suitcase and to shut the lid. I want to slam and lock the door firmly on the past and turn away into a new life. I don’t want memories dribbling through the cracks, hissing like venomous snakes. Who the heck does? And yet, and yet, my long fingers keep reaching back through old times, to how it was, to who I was and they are the fretful fingers of an old woman looking for something she will never find. Answers.

I suspect it is natural to quest for such, for answers. I often ask myself why. Why I did this, why he said that, why she made that awful decision, why secrets secrets secrets were kept so hidden. There is a big unrest in the desert lands of Unanswered Questions. Oh what I wouldn’t give for a day with himself to get those answers and yet (and yet) I know he would never reveal a thing. He didn’t when he was alive for almost 50 years. He was obviously quite the thing about not answering difficult questions. So how do I get to a place of acceptance? I suspect there is no fast track answer to that one. Are we all mysteries to each other, I wonder? Perhaps we are and perhaps this is a normal human state, one of intense frustration right up to the end. Is death a marvellous escape? Do those who know they are dying feel a wonderful sense of relief that finally, finally, they are excused from the Accountability Class? It sounds rather kind when I think of it that way.

But life right now is like being stuck on a telegraph pole but without the 360 head turning ability. I have that screech voice and I silence it. I say I am great, fine, well, busy. We all do, I guess, in the hope that something will click at a deeper level, that my brain will believe it and invite my heart to take it in, to warm it, to beat it into new life. I know, I know, it is early days, but it is also a year, no it is over ten years of watching his secret self slowly leave the room whilst remaining in it, noisily. That is a long long time.

An irreverent chuckle comes to me in my turmoil. I have an image memory of people who won’t go. You make it obvious that after ten hours that your come-for-coffee invite is wearing very thin. They rise, eventually, but keep talking. You head for the door and open it. They stay where they are and keep talking. Now a freezing wind with accompanying rain is drenching both you and the floor. Still they talk, flapping hands and saying giggly things like ‘Oh we should go, you’ve been so kind, we stayed too long…’ You shut the door, well defeated. You didn’t offer lunch, having clocked that these good people are having so much fun that their going home just might feel like back to jail and you are not unkind even if you didn’t offer lunch. You finally get them out the door and close it quick quick. The short distance from the door to the gate suddenly looks like the road to Zanzibar. Inching, inching, inching, hearing, and enthusing about this cousin, this new baby, this new purchase, you get them through the gate.

Waving them off feels like heaven.

Maybe I will do that with my long staying unanswered questions.

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Island Blog – The Man Who Stole

We got through it. The one year anniversary of a significant death. My kids, sorry, our kids, all apart from each other and from me, marked the day in the way that mattered to them. Walking in the wild, finding the sea, talking to old fishermen on a pier, watching a river flow. I felt like my belly was in turmoil. All the day long it churned and rumbled and I wasn’t hungry. Well, not for food. For what, then? Don’t, please don’t, think ‘Closure’. There is no such thing and it is such a dreadful cliche. It’s almost as angry making as phrases like ‘He is in a better place.’ Oh, you think? How do you know?

My lovely daughter-in-law (an awful title when you completely adore the aforesaid), and I picnicked on the grave. Not quite on it, on him, but to the side, respectful like. We spread a blanket and poured tea from a flask, and munched on lobster sandwiches, as you do up here as easily as another in non-lobster-land might munch on luncheon meat or jam. We talked of much and many, but not a lot on the dead dude. Funny that. Lots of people drove by as the hilltop graveyard is very visible for anyone driving, cycling or walking the switchback road. These folk see us from the minute they lift the hill and we are in their view for at least 6 minutes as they curve and loop and swing and climb out of sight. We were visible, we on our checkered picnic blanket, our mouths open in laughter at some daft joke shared. We sat for an hour and talked about the other graves. One very wonky one, just a wooden cross with a name on it, the cross that I swear is moving in on my husband because the last time I came this cross was further aft of amidships. I wonder if it’s lonely, if nobody ever visits, comes to pay respects, to honour, to mark a death. Perhaps. It sads me. Other stones tell the story, fix a life lived between two dates and add a little something that meant a lot to those left behind. It feels like that person meant something, mattered, was loved.

Many years ago it was common to see families picnicking in graveyards, as they came together to celebrate their dead, or someone else’s dead. There is a something in a graveyard that beckons. I know what it is. Stories. Stories allow imagination. I wonder who Alfred MacDoodle was, how he was, what he meant to his children, grandchildren, friends. He played the violin, no, he played the fool, he cooked, he was a teacher, fisherman, magician. In a graveyard I can let my mind fly like the birds that flew overhead yesterday. The air is hilltop fresh up here and the looking is endless. Islands dark the sea, so far away and yet so clear. The sealine butts against the sky, some, what, hundreds of miles away, more? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I am here and looking and so is my imagination, so is my memory. He, the dead one, knew those waters better than he ever knew me. He could navigate those waters in any and all states better than he ever navigated me or his children. Such is who he was, who he is now, held fast in memory, like a fossil in stone. An imprint on the world and certainly an imprint on us.

We, who apparently are ‘left behind’, which sounds very lame to me, can weave any story we like now. The Corrector Of Facts is buried 6 feet deep and awaiting his grave stone (Covid delay). We can tell you he was wonderful or awful. We can recount his achievements or list his faults. We can present him as The Whale Father or the Absent Father. We can highlight the lack or illuminate the abundance he brought to us all. We are free to go and not free at all because he, this dead guy was so important, so revered, so bloody impossible, so powerful an influence that we cannot but bring him with us from now on.

And, for me, he was no whale father, no father at all. He was not a recording engineer, not a hotel owner, not a pioneer, not a sailor. He was the man who stole my heart.

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Island Blog – The sharper the knife

Two days to go. Then it will be a whole year since himself breathed his last. It is hard to believe and yet easy. I cast back to the days between then and now and cannot remember a lot of it. Many days were just a slog, a pointless slog and many other days were full of skips and puddle jumping. I notice more now that Time is my ‘bidey-in.’ I notice puddles, their shape and size and the way they grow, claiming more ground as that primary element argues with another one. I notice the way Spring comes shyly, nervous of pushing out too soon, just like me. I notice petals, watch them fall and wonder how they choose that very moment to do so. I see the turning of the beech leaves and just have to stand beneath them. I hear sounds more clearly, some sharp-slash ear offences, some soft and landing like, well, petals. I am aware of what I touch and how it feels to my fingertips. I notice a founder in those same fingers when I attempt to unpackaged packaging, or lift a heavy pot to the hob. I hear the sound of water coming to the boil in a pasta pan even from the next room. The tic, tic, tic of a clock is Time telling me she is here, as if I didn’t already know that. I can taste the snap-smell of his plaid shirts, the only things I haven’t yet moved on. They no longer smell of him and how could they? Everything was washed and double washed many months ago. I think I might make a patchwork soft mat from cuts of these shirts. They were so his ‘fashion’, a hanging on to the days of being a lumberjack in Canada so many years ago.

Years ago. His life by many stories was a long one. A wonderful one, he said, and often. Funny how we are never satisfied, never able to agree with ‘enough’ when it involves waving a final farewell. I know he didn’t want to live on. Who does in the late throws of dementia? I wouldn’t, for sure. He went happy and peaceful. That’s it. End of. Well, maybe it was for him. But now I feel like a pioneer facing a wilderness. The land endless before me goes right up to where my eyes meet the skyline and I have no map. I am not afraid, not lost, not in despair, no way. But this is so new to me that I confess to a bit of circling and a lot of hiding behind rocks. I go out, I keep a clean and tidy house, I feed myself well, I love music, I write, sew, dance (occasionally), walk every day and, as far as I can tell, house a lively brain. I have humour, mischief, a sense of fun and many good friends.

All this does not minimise the wilderness, that vast maw of sand, rocks, emptiness and maplessness. A load of ‘esses’ for sure. The way it alters, changes my language, my thoughts, my beliefs, my faith. I have faith, I have belief in something for me even if I don’t know what the hellikins that means and I have fun learning a new language. This, in itself, is perusable. Although I am, I confess, a lover of good strong language, words can escape me. I am thankful for Roget, a bible for writers. My battered copy is always beside me so that when I cannot find the right word, the one that accurately describes what I want to say instead of just ‘trending on twitter’ jumps out at me like a sudden-ness and that is okay. I am allowed, I tell myself, to lose the words I once found so easy to lift into the light because most of what I found so easy to lift into the light has been cut away, just like that, in a single not-breath.

I was reminded by my lovely daughter-in-law just yesterday of the final breath moment. She loved her father-in-law and he loved her. Her eyes lit up and her face lifted as she told me something I had forgotten. Remember, she said, as you all sat beside him watching his faltering breaths? Go on, I tell her, trying to find my way back to that moment. Well, she says, he took a big gasp breath and then everything went still. You looked at each other and began to move. This is it. The big man is gone. Suddenly, he breathed again, a big draw of earthly air and you all laughed, turning back to him. The next breath was his last, but that moment, he, the one who always had to be the centre of attention, claimed his right to it one more time.

‘The sharper the knife, the less you cry.’ So they say.

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Island Blog – The Best View

Heavy rain, like water bullets, straight down rain, none of this fluffing fallshift of soft water dash against my face. This was a wetting. I watched the opportunity for a while. I considered my cloaking, my ineffective coveration, my footwear, and pulled back. I pulled back long enough for even the Pull Back to raise its eyebrows. Are you going or are you planning to spend the day lurching towards the window like a catapult with old pants elastic?

I don’t like the old pants bit and it stirred me somewhat. I stand taller. Ok, I say, I am offski. Before the old girl in me can catch up I am footed and rainproofed and attaching the wee dog to her lead. Door open. We are out. Good grief! This rain is pelting like reproval. It is so straight down I turn to yell (and regret it) Bend Somewhat! It is either deaf, the rain or determined. I sigh, open the gate and head for the wild place. The track is jiggling water in potholes, the rain-off sloughing like a serpent down into anywhere that’s down. Water always seeking the sea, the river, the outfall, the easy way to go. I am not doing ‘easy way’ but I am not water, I remind myself.

As I wander, because I like the whole wander thing, even in the rain, I observe. The chestnut tree is hanging low, branches so huge and so powerful are bending. I look up and say hi. On and more trees, bowed in fragility and yet still so strong. The wind rises and rises puffing and luffing, lifting, playful. It wonders me as I see massive wood limbs holding life-giving leaves, reach out way too far from the body, from the mother trunk. And yet there is power there, control and the fabulous knowing that that ancient trunk is holding you, holding and holding.

The leaves are already turning, I see the beech leaves twisting at the edges and giving in to copper. I hear the woodland choir, led by the wind. At the shore, where I walk every day to remind myself of not where we began but where so many hundreds, thousands of others began their beginning with us. The chance to see whales. I can smell the excitement even now as I wander in a past land, through gorse, popping seeds and noisily, where the seaweed lays across the out-tide rocks, copper, flaxen, lime, blood and where a heron squawks at me and lifts in lazy flaps; where oystercatchers fly above the tide, turn to me, catch the sudden sunlight and turn into fluttering pearls; where the chance of seeing some wild thing lifts a head above the water in an hour’s watching. We yearn for the wild encounter. We always did and we always will.

Let the seasons be. They are not as we once knew them, predictable and uniform, to a degree. They are wild now, and free. We have a hand in that but it is not the hand that gives up, that turns, that lifts in latent anger. It is done. We are here. We can dance through them, adapt and welcome. We can be a part of what is happening now or we can whine and criticise from the sidelines of life. Eish…….don’t do that. Engage. Join me in the frontline. We’ll get the best view.

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Island Blog – Very Blessed

This day I wake early, faff a bit, clean something, clear another. I like a tidy home. It was never tidy when I lived with a husband who didn’t do ‘tidy’. He scoffed, and said, oftentimes, that he considered it an affliction, like exzema or asthma. Even if it didn’t look like it I did honestly try to outrun his scoffing but it had faster legs and was canny. It could hide in corners and wait for my back to be turned. And it was very successful. In the end I gave up, to a degree, focussing on my innate skills and gifts and, to be honest, clearing up has never been one of those, even if I did, over time, morph into the extension of a broom, a mop or a dishcloth for decades.

I know what is happening later and I am so excited about the happening later thingy. Just a few weeks ago I would have cancelled. I know I would. I was very into cancelling and not just through lockdowns but way back into the caring years when I had lost myself. Everyone does, I hear it through the mouths of others, their tongues working out the consonants and verbs and pronouns and careful, so careful to halt the flood of emotion that could turn any sentence into a grammatical flood of nonsense. I can ride that flood with them, that wave, even if the words follow no particular order. I know, and yet I have no idea, how they feel. All loss and grieving is different, even if the name is the same. Mother. Father. Brother. Sister. Husband. Wife. And, God forbid, Child. But we can go into the rapids together, we can understand, to a degree and by more degrees than those who have not experienced such deaths.

There is a meeting of Bereaved Carers. How brilliant it that! The only people in the room will be, well, bereaved carers. I feel both safe and excited to meet whoever comes. I know the facilitator and she is like a sparkle, so we are all safe. We have a room to ourselves. We can talk out all the shit we feel, or not. We can go into awful detail without wondering if the rest of the room will barf and run. We know each other even if we don’t know each other at all. We drink tea, well they do, but it is strong coffee for me. A teapot lands on the table, a fat bellied old fashioned Derby, I guess, and it is warming, just the look of it. I managed to lose a teapot, I speak out loud. Me too, says another. How did we do that? We think in a communal sort of think. Well, I say, I reckon I must offered my teapot for a bigger group one day and then forgot to collect it. She, with the twinkly eyes and barely a wrinkle on her face nods. Maybe, she says, and we laugh. Actually we laugh a great deal, about caring, about death, about loss and emptiness. We laugh about the slow movement of time, the way we fill in the hours, the way we coped in the thick of caring.

It is delightfully freeing. I am certain each one of us leaves feeling humbled. There was she who dealt with that. She who coped with this, and not just once. There was the one who dipped and lifted, faltered and regained footing over a very long time. We may not see each other for a while but we will all remember this day and think of each other. Each one of us will remember the laughs, the gallows humour, the private sharing that will help us to heal lonely wounds. And, all thanks to the intuitive support we are offered. The Mother Hen. Argyll Carers. Support through caring, through the horrors, not afraid to take whatever gets yelled down the phone or straight to face.

I think we are very very blessed.

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Island Blog – Dreamers, Just Go

We are the dreamers. Did you know that? Dreamers are the ones who, if they believe in those dreams, can change their world, and, accordion to the ripple effect, change other lives in the process. I am not necessarily talking about the weird things that come into our heads overnight, nor am I a follower of those who say they can explain such dreams. What I mean is that, if someone can follow their dream, even if it is just for today, just a weeny thing that appears to have no import, then, if that someone takes action, even if it feels weird and a bit ‘out there’, then who knows what may come of that dream?

It can be powerful. Let me break it down. In this strangest of days, as I wonder who the hellikins I am having buried a strong, dominant leader of a man, I could fluff. I could be like a dandelion clock, just there for someone to blow away. But I know I have roots, even if I cannot feel the security of those roots in the ground. All I know is that I will not flop. Not me. I am not a flopper. So, this dream thing. I wake early and know, although I wonder who told me, I just suddenly ‘know’ that I need to walk out, and right now. Because I am used to someone else telling me what I ‘know’ for so long, I am somewhat confounded when the messenger comes to me direct. I am looking about for himself. Oh, he isn’t here. You mean me? Well, yes, I hear, and I am now facing this directive. I swither. But, but and but again. I planned to do this, or that. I can see eyes rolling and I chuckle. I haven’t washed the breakfast dishes I whine, nor swept the floor and I always do those things at this time and in sequence. More eyes rolling. I do pause to wonder how often eyes can roll without disappearing altogether.

Ok, ok, I say, I will go walk right now, leaving the dirt and the dishes. Ok, enough already. I am pulling on my trainers and it is barely light. I wake the dog and drag her puzzled self out into the wild. She resists, a lot, digging in her small feets but I am having none of it. I know she is telling me that we walk later, following the routine. Yes, yes, I tell her but I am bigger and stronger than you and you will come. Her skids show in the track. I feel slightly sorry for her but if I know anything about the female of any species I know that we are very good at adapting. Eventually she concurs and trots along beside me. We watch early sunlight turn beech leaves to emeralds. We startle deer in the woods and they thunder away, their white scuts flashing. At the old pier the tide is full and still. Slack water, the pause between flow and ebb, the moment captured. I, we, are part of this moment. The tide is flood, meaning there is a full moon coming, but not yet. The water is very high and so clear. I can see way down. It is a while before the plankton bloom turns the sea cloudy. We are a part of that moment too. I see crabs scuttle, oystercatchers fly, geese swashbuckle in the shallows, curlews pipe overhead and herons croak like old smokers.

Then it comes, that flipjack, that effortless gymnast, the otter. I stand in awe, watching this extraordinary creature, king or queen of his or her world, dive, catch and eat, on the run. I hear the crunch of shell. He or she is only a few feet away but I am no threat. The kelp lies still, no wave action. The rocks, illuminated by saltwater, shine like varnish. The early sun lifts and pinks the clouds and here am I watching a dream. Had I stayed home to wash dishes and sweep floors as is my routine, I would have missed this magic.

Don’t miss the magic. If that dream nudges, then go.

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Island Blog – Find a Way

Today wakes me different. I rise in the lime green and pad downstairs. Today, I announce to nobody there, will be a good day! I have to do this announcing thing because if I left this day to my now feelings it would cascade into shards by lunchtime. It takes a while to work it out. Strong black coffee helps. I can feel things changing, making that shift I know so well, from thoughtless reaction to mindful action. It is, to be honest, a pain in the bouzouki but I know I must engage with this process for I am vulnerable to emotional collapse. Only vulnerable. Not collapsing. But the edge of error is like a chef’s sharpened knife blade, super thin and very dangerous. There is either a goodly cut or a deep wound. I swither on the rocks of this one. I have been on these rocks for some time and not just since my only husband died, but before that as I watched him disappearing whilst still in the room.

So my choice of action is (yes mindful) a daily choice, no, an hourly one because the clutching fear of nothingness is always at my heels. So I walk. Finally I get why people who are tossed out of the world they have known for most of their lives, begin to walk. I also get that they don’t know why. It is a compulsion, a need, a drive. But for what, to what, I cannot say. I just know it helps. And it sure beats sitting on my jaxy to watch the enviably vibrant together load of people go by, laughing and sharing and with a whole chatty afternoon ahead.

I set off at 7am, a grand time to walk. Most of the people I know never see 7am, never mind 0500. And if they do, its a yawning Monday go-to-work thing. So I am free to go, alone with the seabirds and the scutterbuck deer, the owls that are late to bed and the swallows who are definitely planning a trip. The trees are bowed, tunnelled with the night rain. I heard it through my curtains and said my always prayer of thanks. I know a continent of states that would give anything for rain, not least North Columbia right now. We diss rain at our peril. It is so so very precious.

I and the almost awake wee dog wend our way through the green that will not be green for much longer. I see leaves already turning. I tell the dog this and she stops to stare at me as if I am her greatest puzzlement. There is a young hedgehog on the track. It doesn’t move and there are greenbottles on its back. Oh, sweetheart, I say and hunker down. Are you alive? It hears me, or feels me, and lifts its pretty snout, eyes blinking. I can see you are sick, I say, nuzzling its face with my finger. We connect. I am not up for banging it on the head but this baby is not well.

We move on.

On the shore we find an otter, maybe ‘the’ otter fishing and watch him for a while. It is high tide, my favourite. I haven’t seen it here for some time. The thing about high tide is her hold on herself. She floods like she has no respect for any shoreline argument and once her power subsides, she holds. Hold, she says. Hold. I am here and I am important. I envy her sassiness and tell her so and we laugh together. She alone can give life back to the dried kelp. She alone can claim land that thought it was land until she came in like Lady Gaga. She laughs me. As she has soaked pretty much every sitting point, I don’t sit, but stand my full but diminishing height and look around me. Oystercatchers twirple through the air, curlews, geese and gulls, responding to my arrival. I see your hold, I say to the full tide. Respect.

Home again and now I must fill in the day so I write, I write about the missing, the freedom and the how the heck do I manage two conflicting thoughts? The death date looms. Although I am not in the least sentimental, I do find that anniversaries knock at the door of my mind, surprising me like I forgot it. Not this one. I can feel it coming like something I want to push away, defer, ignore. But it needs to come and I know that. I will not go to his grave and sob. This is not me. But there is a something so huge about his death that I cannot explain. We were we. Now we are not we. I like the I of me and always did, but this is different. It isn’t a game anymore. It is horribly real.

Give me time. I’ll find a way.