I wake at 4.30 to the keen of gulls and the wish-wash rhythm of sea meeting harbour walls. Boats of all shapes and sizes pepper the fractious surface as they bob and shift like restless birds, their mastheads singing spooky in the wind. Somewhere beyond my view, the big engines of a cruise ship keep a steady bass line as they have night-long. Below my second floor window a lone council worker in luminous green safety gear picks litter with a long grab. He works slowly, moving along the pavement, one cigarette butt at a time, sometimes at first try, sometimes after two or three attempts. I want to ask if if he bends in the middle; if it wouldn’t be quicker to use his regulation gloved hands, but I keep my silence. The ways of council are quite beyond my ken.

Yesterday afternoon I drove the switchback to get here, here being the local town that almost sinks with the weight of tourists in the summer. As I came down the hill and saw the street paved with cars, cheek to jowl, bumper to snout with barely room between for a cat to sleek through, my heart sank. I just knew there would be no space for me, and if a gap appeared I would need to do something terrifying like go into reverse; to snake my mini into an impossible unspace whilst holding up a line of critical drivers. I always think the whole town stops to watch me cock it up, which I generally do. I abandon my car wonkychops but safe enough and check into the hotel, for I am here purposefully. I have come to see the singer sing me a lift, and I am not disappointed.

It’s over 30 years since she and her band, Capercaillie came to us for a ten day first recording of their album Delirium. I remember the excitement I felt, the panic that sent me checking and re-checking their rooms, picking flowers for every surface and cooking delicious meals. It was a happy time and the band so easy to be with. Music spun its magic throughout Tapselteerie over those days and nights of change and development, of repeat after repeat, of a single instrument making its own voice heard and then folding like velvet into the cut and colour of the finished garment. And above it all the singer soared like a bird, canting on the breeze, sunlight on her rainbow wings.

Age has not fallen her. Her voice is exquisite. But what impacted me most last evening was how she throws her whole self into the melodies and the words. Taking songs from way back in history, songs from all across the world, songs of waulking, grieving, loss, joy and hope, she gifted them to us. Even not understanding a word of Gaelic, I knew about what she sang. She showed me with her face, her body, her hands describing the air around her, and the music beneath her voice was no less emotive. Lifting and rounding, punching and raging, weeping and sighing, the instruments in sensitive and dynamic composition gave flesh to the bones as she sang them all, one by one, calling them by name.

When it was over we talked. It thought me of our different paths over 3 decades, our lives lived out in very different circumstances and, yet, we have a bond, like a stave of music, solid and strong no matter how long away or how far. I walked down the hill beneath a darkling sky, the town silent as midnight moved closer. I am so very glad I came because there is a new song in me this early morning and it sings out clear and strong.

As I drive home, back into the ordinary, the song comes with me. I can feel it like a bird, right here beneath my ribs, just waiting for its time to fly.

In Greek mythology there was a goddess. Actually, there were quite a few of them, but this one rose into my mind just yesterday from the lines of a book. Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Daughter of Uranus (heaven) and Gaia (earth) and mother herself of the nine muses thanks to Zeus. Quite a goddess. She is the one, I am guessing, that you prayed to when you had lost something. Your kingdom for instance, or a battle, or your marbles.

On another shore of the heavenly endless spaces a very different goddess was breathing first life. Lethe, the goddess of forgetting, of oblivion. She, according to mythology was the daughter of Eris, meaning Strife and was named for one of the five underworld rivers in Hades. Anyone who drank from the waters of Lethe forgot everything – their whole life just gone, both the good and the bad.

There is a theory that these two were actually twins. Two fathers, one mother they grew facing each other in the womb. Obviously, Mnemosyne was born first. It would be hard to forget everything without a memory being there in the first place, after all.

This idea thinks me. I know that in a tough life, or in a life where terrible awful things have happened, it is natural to want to forget the terrible awful, to let it float away on the waters of Lethe, for ever gone from memory. But, as is always the case in this life, things are not that simple. In order to forget the terrible awful I must forget all of the rest, all those joyous memories, the history, the experience, the sharing of a metaphorical sandwich on the trudge road.

Well, I don’t want to do that. Just imagine beginning all over again with not a footprint recognised as I look back, not even my own. No thanks. So, how do I, or does anyone, manage the rough with the smooth, make it one shape, a shape that works for me, that takes me forward in joy and hope and not in dread?

I think it is a mistake to seek oblivion, despite wishing, often, it was not. If I consign the terrible awful (and mine is nothing compared to so many terrible awfuls) to oblivion, what has it taught me? Nothing, it would seem. But in denying the existence of it, I achieve but a short term lift. In a hunt for memories without the awfuls getting in the way, I paint an untruth. This happy memory is just a cupcake, a cameo. It doesn’t feel real and that’s because it isn’t real. Real is both joy and awful and within any given scenario, we must have both or we just don’t believe it. It becomes a child’s fairytale, one in which everything is quite marvellous and leaves us with furred teeth from too much sugar. However much we might want that sugar, it will never be enough. The awfuls must be interlaced through the whole picture or we simply tire of the story long before it ends.

But how do I manage to conjoin these two as I look back down the track of my life, of my tears, fears, denials, joys and delights? The way I have learned to embrace such a big challenge is this – when an memorical awful shoots into my mind like a missile, I catch it. Stay right there, I tell it, for I am in charge here, not you, not this time. It came to me via a trigger, something said or done that shot me backwards into the awful, and because I had arrived in person, I brought breath into the lungs of it. Like doing CPR on a memory. I go into a quiet place with the awful and sit with it. I tell it that it has overly inflated itself over the decades and I am not impressed with all those feathers and bling and that fat belly. It tells me, with an impressive amount of well-flourished detail, the whole story. I, of course, play the victim. But, wait. I wasn’t a victim, oh no. I was an integral part of this awful happening, or, at the very least, of allowing it to happen by not taking action at the time. I consider this. I know that taking action at the time would have been dangerous and not just for me. I also know that I was worn down, fooled, oppressed and controlled. That all sounds very dramatic for the teensy awfuls of my own life, but not so for some who really had no power at all at the time.

However, it is not back then we are talking about here, but the right here and now. How to manage this memory. How to allow it space to be there at all. I sit some more with the awful and, as I watch it, replay whatever amount of scene I can truly remember. Soon, I feel the soft and reassuring hands of Mnemosyne on my shoulders, light as sunrise on a summer’s morning. The fat belly begins to deflate and I really want to laugh. The surprise on the face of the awful is a picture. The bling dulls and dissolves, the feathers flop until before me sits a very small awful indeed. It looks like it’s been through a 60 wash and a long fast spin.

I go back into my life. I don’t forget the awful but I no longer need to give it CPR. It has a place in my journey and it always will, but what I have learned from it, and all the others, is priceless. They made me strong and colourful, defiant and loving. They made me complete.

And the truth is that, without these awfuls, there would be no story to tell.

When I step out to fill up the bird feeders and to sprinkle the lowground table with no-mess, no-grow seed, the garden birds hide deep inside the potentilla. Buttery blooms coat the outside leaves, their faces upturned to a tissue paper sky. There is rain up there somewhere, but this bothers not my feathered friends. I hear the chattering. Sparrows, always in a group, finches, gold, red and colours of the earth, coal blackbirds, glint of eye with orange beaks, their mates speckled breasted and altogether bigger. Not that being bigger means much in Blackbird World. The women always get second best. It’s the same for us, I tell them in my soft bird voice, as one male scoots out in angry pursuit of his hen. They eyeball me and scoot just as quickly back into shelter with a storm rise of accusation v justification. She gives as good as he, I can hear her having the last word. As I complete my round, the brave ones appear. Siskins on the sunflower hearts, goldfinches on the nijer, blackbirds still busy fighting over who gets what. I watch them through the window.

Yesterday I met a friend for lunch. We haven’t seen each other for a year so I knew our meeting would have no struggle with a word exchange or two. Add the woman who took our order and served us. Now there are three women engaging in each other’s stories, ideas and opinions. Very dynamic and enough to send all males running for the hills. Women talk too much, they mutter into their pints, returning almost immediately to that infuriating silence that tells all women men are basically not interested at all in anything beyond their work, football or the politics of the country. Certainly not in how someone is feeling. We don’t mention feelings, we men. In fact, I think you will find we don’t feel at all and we most certainly never use the word in public.

Birds Talk. Birds talk Bird Talk. In a short hour or so, we women covered more ground than Yosemite National Park and by the time it came to goodbyes, we knew a great deal about each other, about many other others, about how they must feel about this or that inside their lives. We also know how to apply the best calming oils to ageing knees, how awful it must be for so-and-so to still be waiting for the builder to come make window repairs after over a year; how to shoot rosemary through a lemon posset and where best to plant echinacea for a strong healthy crop. I learned about leaving the broken child in the past, about holidays planned and appropriate clothing purchased. I heard of loneliness and despair, of a good manicurist, of where not to go for a haircut or colour. I learned of those hurting and those healing. I heard of nature and the metaphysical world, the chances sent to all of us to connect with our otherness. And I heard and discussed so much more. In one little hour, three women, sometimes talking all at once, forged a bond that will remain in all of our minds for sometime to come. At times when we feel blue or black we will dive deep into the colours of that random connection and find new strength, particularly the one we all need so badly around our silent menfolk.

Women talk too much. Well, thank the gods for that.

A pilgrim has to start somewhere and it’s usually the beginning. But who is to say where that beginning begins? I suspect it appears, this beginning, when something or everything needs to change and radically. To discover new lands a person needs imagination, possibly a boat, certainly new footwear and the courage to walk away from what was, when what will be is hiding in a forward fog. Turning pointless circles prior to a launch into the unknown is, well, pointless but I can turn pointlessly for months, scared of making any sort of wild song break, my imagination delivering witches, disasters and empty pockets each morning as I wake. I swing on a trapeze of should I, shouldn’t I until get airsick.

But Life is kindly and oh so patient. I can just see the eye rolling of this beneficent matriarch as she looks down on my swinging ditherments. She knows I have time on my side, but I don’t, so that every swither and dither eats away at me as I block my ears to the persistent knocking of opportunity on the door of my soul. I have writ before now on the slow ebbing away of my self-confidence #primarycarer and this ebbing thingy is all very well until it imprisons me. I go through the whole shebang inside my head, speak it out to no-one and why is that? I’ll tell you why. It’s because there is no-one who can truly fit their feet into my shoes. Even another primary carer is some distance away because of the human factor. I am not them, they are not me. I care for a someone and that someone is not their someone. My home is not theirs, my daily round not theirs and vice versa. Simples. But, pondering anything the shape of a dilemma all by myself just sets me a-spinning so that now I am dizzy and airsick.

However (love the flip of that word) holding on to the horns of a dilemma may give me an elevated view of the roads before me, but it will not offer me the chance to pilgrim. Pilgrims travel ground-fastened and alone as a rule, urged on by a dream for change and absolutely no idea what lies beyond the fog. Journeying in between worlds is what most folk never want to do. In fact, neither does the pilgrim. He or she would far rather google map the journey and know from the little red icon precisely where she will make new land, and when. Me too. But that is not how pilgriming works, more’s the pity. Instead there is fog, and if not fog, then a sharp-toothed slip wind and a lurk of roadside dangers whose eyes I cannot see through the tree-laden darkness.

I dilemma often. The bedside wraiths gather like judges around me at first light. They only have to give me that look, the one that tells me I absolutely cannot do this thing, which might be a very small thing or a circus tent sized thing, and, ps, I am an utter fool for even thinking I can. And I am defeated. But not for long, and why is that? Because I get straight out of bed, shoo the undead away and pull on a pretty frock. Even when it’s blattering rain outside and the flowers dip their fragrant petals in submission; even when I just know that something will happen today that is beyond me and that I will need to boot up and deal with it; even after a turbulent non-sleep and the sudden remembering of a bill unpaid; even when the echo of yesterday’s guilt won’t stay in yesterday, even then.

Life is for dancing through. I will not trudge across the stumbleground of this day in a sensible mac pushing bodily through the waterfall that the rest of you call rain. No. I will not. I will dance. Music, song, beginnings, middles, fog, all of it pilgrim fodder. And I have no intention, nor do I have the right, to let Life slip along without my eyes on her every moment. She gave me heart, lungs, backbone and freedom.

And the eyes in the tree-laden darkness could well be friends.

Why is salt white? Of course, the answer is obvious once you consider the whole process of salt-making, all that seawater landing, drying out in the sun and the wind and turning hard. There is no room for black. Pink, yes, if the crystallisation work is done in pink areas of the world. But not black. Why not? This is a question from a young and curious mind, a soft wild muscle yet to be world-handled into a stultified realism. In this mind, anything is possible and to be on the receiving end of such a question is to breath childhood back in to ageing lungs. Refreshing, it is, and in a split second, half listening whilst I consider whether or not to add Worcester sauce to the stir fry, my mind firmly sat sitting in the stop of what is and what is not possible, I gasp. Wow! What a great question! (when did I stop fiddling with the boundaries of possibles?)

I don’t know, I reply, turning away from the pan. The should-I, shouldn’t- I of Worcester sauce suddenly lumpates me into a block of lard. When did my head get world-handled into a sort of predictable stagnation? I look down at her face, all smooth and wide-open and I want so much to wander with her around the globe in search of black salt. I want nothing more right now. We could go to books and study and flick Google into life, but I just know therein lies disappointment so I don’t even suggest it. I have, however, lost all interest in the useful, or not, properties of Worcester sauce and my childmind heads off to Brazil or to the days of Viking Kings, or even into the land of Grimm wherein can be found all manner of black things.

In older children I can see the wane of the breathless moon. That’s nonsense Granny, one might say as I weave a lunatic web of sticky fairies and sun-dappled magical woods in the land of Faraway. But there is a smile and there is silence as I take them with me. The older ones are learning the ways of the world, one they will need to inhabit with both feets on the ground. It feels like a leaving, like an ‘either this or that’ dilemma, well horned up and I want to run after that forming mind and call out…….never forget…..never!

In the ferry queue, sitting in sunshine and surrounded by excited travellers, my eyes turn to a granny, like me, with two little boys in a double buggy. One is quietly watching seagulls flip and toss over his head, the huge ferry making land, the men in flak jackets catching ropes. There is shouting, and beeping and a voice on the tannoy urging passengers to disembark from Deck B (as opposed to leaping overboard of course) and for dogs to be controlled at all times and la la la-di-da. The big ferry mouth begins to rise, making a shin-ding of a noise about it. Slowly slowly, too slowly, it reaches its zenith and the noise stops suddenly, leaving a huge gap in everybody’s listening. The other little boy asks his Granny ‘What happens to noise when it stops, Granny? Where does it go?’

She catches my eye and we smile a shared granny smile. I don’t know, she replies. Maybe, just maybe it goes on to someone else who needs it. ‘What, all the way around the world? he asks, twisting his head to eyeball her.

Maybe, she says. Why not?

I adventure in my mind all of the time. I mean all of the time. Someone once said that the best adventures are always inside your head and he was right. Inside an imagination there are no boundaries created by A N Other. Only I can lay them down and I will never do that to stop me moving on, even if moving on is a lunatic idea, which it often is. Inside my mind I am brave, able, strong and the one who dares to defy the odds. However, when a real adventure beckons, and, by real, I mean one for which I need to pack my bag, I am a right ninny.

Today I catch the ferry for the mainland. The air is calm beneath a sky of cloud whitewash. There is no rising gale, no lashing rain to alarm me. All will be well, and, at the end of all that well-being, I have my daughter and her family to smile me into harbour. Three days of shelter, fun and someone’ else’s cooking. But, do I have the right chargers for the right workhorses? Laptop, phone, music speaker, blue tooth headphones for a talking book and so on. Do I take a big jumper or a small one? Shall I make a sandwich for the drive, or buy one en route? In the grand scheme of things, whatever that means, these questions are fretful nonsense. So what if I forget something? It’s 3 days for heaven’s sake.

At Tapselteerie, I adventured absolutely nowhere other than in my head. Oh what stories I spun, what worlds I visited and ventured through! Nothing went wrong, and, if a wraith appeared I could soon lift myself off the page, relegating said wraith to a nothing space which is where wraiths should be all of the time. In the real world, however, it is not quite so easy. For a start, gravity keeps me affixed to the ground, a definite limitation in the case of a wraith encounter. But my mind is strong, or that is what I tell myself, and this wraith of doom isn’t really standing (or floating) in my path. I look at the roadside flowers instead. They sing a much brighter song and I can sing along with them whereas I won’t even try to emulate the menacing shriek of a wraith. I would just end up with a sore throat and might even, inadvertently, call up a few of its friends.

I believe that being well stuck in this caring bubble is what strips me of wildflowers along my banks. It seems to drain my confidence for even the smallest of things and as for the big things, like driving a hundred miles or so with other cars on a wide road with no end of potential dangers lurking in the trees, I find myself ashake. When life pulls in her skirts and keeps a person contained for years, she brings both a prison and the chance to find (or relocate in my case) the rebel spirit. Seems odd, that, to present both. When a woman is contained for long enough, she will eventually grow sharp teeth and claws. It isn’t that she wants to pick a fight with A N Other, but with herself. The wimp must either tag along or leave the page because adventures are the breath of life to her. How she finds her confidence and her feet is by deciding that both have just been asleep for a while. They need waking up and she still has her voice and her imagination. She can do this. If she can fly in her mind, then she can fly out there and love the fizzing buzz of adventure ,wherever it may take her.

I make a sandwich, pack two jumpers and head for the ferry, grabbing my self-confidence as I go.

Birdsong. The mellow and sweet of it. The shrieks of panic (about everything) and the stone silence after a successful hawk attack. The soar of a violin, be it inside a symphony or a saucy leap into something new that surprises. I like something new and the Something Newers, those who take what is the establishment thinking and cut it up like the icon on a stunning church window which still shows the old and the acceptable but with lead lines of distance in between. lead. lead. 2 different ways of saying that word. One a noun, one a verb. I’m kind of fond of the verb, although I still pay homage to the noun. I often mix my nouns and verbs, intentionally, because the rebel writer in me just loves a feisty dance, which is what it becomes, if challenged. I remember yawningly dull dinner companions, (whose ties were tied so tight they could never have done ‘feisty’ nor ‘dance’) back in the day when dinners were social events and there was this fricken great list of all those you couldn’t not invite, and they always came onatop. It meant that the ones you actually liked, the ones with music in the soles of their feet, got slewed off like stones from a melting glacier. My only consolation in that thought was the fact that the glacier will eventually melt, whereas the stones will not.

Music. I listen to it all the day long. Could be classical, could be wild music, aka, the sound of the islands, rebel songs and tunes, could be great poetry in contemporary songs or it could be those songs that make absolutely no sense at all because the writers were stoned and in the back of a van returning from a gig and just let rip. I find solace in music. None in talk talk or skinny chat about the weather, nor in Love Island (sorry) or anything that shows me the world has gone quite bonkers. I read books on how it was/is to truly survive. Backdrop could be Cold War Russia, downtown Calcutta, booze soaked Greenland, A Home of Well Concealed Abuse, all sorts, all fenced off with something Rabbit Proof that stretches for hundreds of sandy sun-burned miles. And why is this? Because I want to learn how to survive. I want to hear through music and hawk attacks how sharp-witted I need to be. I don’t want more dresses or new lampshades or even a personalised number plate on Maz The Mini. All of this is dust in the wind.

Now this is not doom and gloom but the truth, and our children’s children should hear about it. Not in a way that tells them how it was in the old days; not, this is my only shawl and we hope it will rain/not rain kind of way. Not in the melting glacier misery or the manipulation of huge corporations selling poison as if it was hip. None of that. We should be teaching them (girls in particular) how to change a tyre on a wheelbarrow. How to recognise wild herbs on the banks of the road; how to replace a door handle. What stones work best when making a boundary wall. How to sew a hem (for goodness sake); how to create food for 8 when you only have enough for four.

Now that is music.

The air is still, the sea-loch a mirror. Through my window I watch a reflection of trees, unremarkable hazels turned into art on a saltwater canvas, painted by a master. To my left a little bay curves like the back of a new moon. I see deer running through the shallows, kicking up the still waters into a playful fun, their heads tossing carefree on this fine summer morning. They move more slowly now, heads bent to the saltgrass, soft brown velvet against the green. A family of divers paddle across the mirror, making echo ripples that won’t make land for some time. I go out to feed the birds and Jock is here, as Jock always is. I sit a minute just breathing in the gentle sunshine air and he runs up to me. Each morning he gets closer in response to my welcome voice. He looks at me and then back to the food bin, once, twice, as if to remind me of something I may have forgotten. Bird breakfast. Ok, Jock, I tell him, you win, I’ll bring it out. He follows me, landing with what must be known as a crash in ‘blackbird’ on the fence, like a startle, just inches away. I’m glad it wasn’t you the hawk got yesterday, I say, and he chirrups his own relief. Even though I know the hawk is also hungry and with young to feed, I live in hope that hawks will turn vegetarian.

It thinks me of looking; of what I see and of what that means to me, of how it alters my inner eye, the one that so often chooses wraiths over benign spirits. Those wraiths are always available and not just to me. I can listen (yawning internally) more than often to someone with the thinking that everything has the potential to go wrong all of the time. And they are correct, it does, but it can also go far right, even if we have no control over either. Or do we?

If I watch horror and cruelty on tv, the chances are I will hold those images inside. They can and do influence my quality of sleep, my way of seeing the world, life itself and the colour of the day around me. If I decide not to infect my head with horror and cruelty, even though I know it exists, and everywhere, I can make room for light and bright which also exist, and everywhere. Reading newspapers or listening to the news are two things I abandoned years ago. I can tell you who the prime minister is (for now) but I would rather bury my nose in a good and well-crafted book, thanks all the same, than I would fret my teeth down to a pavement worrying about the state of things in this world.

What I choose to look at and how much welly I give to that lookingness is up to me. Staring across a tidal sea-loch can take up a whole morning, give or take a few snatched coffees and when I do turn away, the image glows like warm embers within. I carry that image with me all day long, feeding it with music, conversation, good books. This image calms me as I breath it deep inside, watch the embers flare into new life. No matter what wraithlike turbulence or self-doubt, chaos or disaster comes my way, I have prepped for them all. I have a dream world inside me and nobody can get their mitts on any of it. Nobody. And, like Alice, I step right in.

Hawks will come. But somewhere in between attacks, there is the chance of sunlight on my back and the wind beneath my wings.

That word took on a whole different meaning once Golam turned it into a destructive obsession. Ok, he was consumed by greed. Like the worldly world. Love of money and all that. But I think me about the real meaning of that word and it plumped like a sclatch to my stomach after I spontaneously offered to drive 3 of my little grand-daughters through to the local town for an ice-cream and to deliver one, the eldest, back to her mama. I thought….here I am driving such a precious cargo on a switchback road with idiot tourists who have no reverse gear in their smart cars and, suddenly, I am aware of ‘precious’.

I was headed for a lip and eyebrow wax and tint. Not the lips but the eyebrows being as they are, curved ghosts above my eyes. We arrived early and found a parking space near the ice cream parlour, originally the public toilets but, thankfully no more, although those who hope for relief half ways around the curve of the Atlantic harbour town might think differently. Ice creamed up, we found an newly relieved bench overlooking the boats. Sailing boats, fishing boats, weirdo looking boats and commercial sea trip boats all bobbed or sailed or motored passed us as we all tried to help the 2 year old manage her fast melting cone. She had a lot to say which doesn’t help. About the shells and the fish and whatsthat of everything including purple-hearted jelly fish and upstanding kelp trees that shimmy in the tidal flow.

Once mopped up and back in the car, I strain my eyes to see if there was a space nearer to the salon. Och, we’ll just wing it, and we did and there is a god of parking opportunities because we found one just outside our destination. In we go, much to the aws and aahs of those within, with their hair in silver foil or their fingers extended for a rainbow nail touch up. Well, my grandchildren are stunners with their carrot red and strawberry blonde hair plus the fact that they, as little ones, are always so very precious to the community. I remember arriving here from Englandshire 40 years ago and marvelling at the adoration of little ones. Little ones came to absolutely everything, however late that everything ran into the night. It was, and is, the island way and my own children benefited from it on regular occasions. In the throwout far-flung places of the world true family includes community and nobody is an island. We are, at first, caught in the web of it, we might struggle to escape, but, eventually we can see the milk, bread and brandy of such a life, one where if you don’t decide to do something then it just won’t happen sort of life because when the storms hit, everyone turns for home and we, out here, must work our own way. I love it now. and this place isn’t even remote, not by remote island standards. We get our post every day, in the main, but I know of women running households where it isn’t just the post that doesn’t arrive, but essential supplies for family and beasts, and that, for a whole storm born winter.

So, we arrive at the salon. The only one on the island and born from a dream of a young girl who has turned her business into everyone else’s. Even the men come for a haircut, into the warm and welcoming easy-osy atmosphere. It’s like a hug. We snake into the little room, holding hands, the 2 year old nervous. I lie on the bed. you look tired Granny, says one. Just wait, I reply, I am about to be messed about with. Tint is applied to my brows and wax to my upper lip. Hahahahaha, the girls laugh. Granny, you look ridiculous! And so I do at this point, with purple wax across my face, and black eyebrows good enough for a goth. All the time, the woman with a dream chats to the little girls, still holding hands, as she puts me through a few ouch-ouchies. And, I am done. Ridiculous now? I ask. You look beautiful, they say. Well, that is wise, as I am the one driving them home.

Precious. Moments. Grandchildren. The trust of a mother who let me be spontaneous. Precious, this life, these times, this moment. Precious ‘not to be wasted or treated carelessly.’

I concur.

I get throughly sogg-droggled walking back along the cliff path. Drops of rain are heavier beneath the canopy of trees but before I reach said canopy the rain is soft and warm on my face and I don’t mind getting wet at all. Ahead of me is a peahen. She notices me and keeps looking back. I am closing the distance between us. I can’t say it feels normal to go walking with a peahen in the rain on a path that runs from a lighthouse to the village, especially as this is not peahen country.

When I first arrived for my 2 day respite break with a friend, I met the peahen in the little garden, all freshly mown and protected by ancient stone walls that have probably kept the sea back since the lighthouse cottages were first built. There is no car access here, only a skinny clifftop path hewn into the rock face, one that rises into a sky that was blue yesterday and punctuated by soaring white tailed eagles. Today the sky is closed, yellowy clouds pulled across her face, not an eagle in sight. Only a peahen at ground level. But my friend does not own a peahen. This now bedraggled creature with a pretty face and a tantalising fascinator perched atop her head, just appeared one day. We feed her cooked chickpeas and boiled potatoes, although she would choose snakes and bugs over our offering any day. We tell her to find her own. Some day she will be captured, bagged and returned to whence she came, but, for now, she prettifies the place and is absolutely silent, unlike a peacock who would split the air with piercing cries and wake us all at dawn.

As I walk back through the rain, I think over the past two days filled with laughter and chat and a bit too much wine. It shined on us, the sun, and we sat on a driftwood bench in the warm garden talking over pretty much everything, including peahens. I also think, as I near the end of the 2k path, having met not one soul, of homecoming. I always need to come home again, wherever I escape to and for however long. Like the peahen I am out of my environment and that ‘outing’ revives me and alters my thinking. 2 days ago I was exhausted and diminished. Now I am feeling stronger and those things that burst me into tears just smile me. They will pass, after all, as everything always does. I will deal with the things I can and ignore the things I cannot and, although that balance is hardly Libran, I can choose to stand on the high side until the scales are level once more.

One day this peahen will be returned to the farm whence she came. What her story is, her reason for leaving is only a guess. She seemed happy there and this place is a long walk away. I think of those who must have met her on her journey and been surprised, astonished, even. It’s a wild place, this, all rock and ocean and skinny unpeopled paths. But she is here. For now. I look back and see her pick her delicate way down to the shore. And then, I turn, and head for home.