Today is my last day in this wee cottage on the cliffs (or near them).  Skylarks sing all day, random dots with tails overhead, like quavers in some divine music score.  Pipits twitter on fence posts, alert for the nest-stealing cuckoo, she (or he) that I hear all around me, but never see.  Covert little tinkers.  Every walk shows me new wildflowers.  Sorrel, vetches, worts, bluebells, primroses, orchids, daffodils and so much more.  I could bore anyone for hours on wildflowers, wild birds, wild anything.  I meet a couple with a walking map and cannot resist interfering.  They are looking for the Whisky Cave, an old illicit still made of stone within its mouth, well hidden from the drink police. I’ve never been.  I just know where it is and that, my dears, is to my shame.  For 20 odd years I waved guests off in different directions with absolute confidence, and never said I had never heard the music myself, nor absorbed the majesty through my own lookingness. When you work in a place, you never go anywhere else but that place, not when it’s a 24/7 job plus infants and working collies, a milk cow, dinner to cook and a husband who is always at sea, even when his backside is on a kitchen chair.

The land rises and falls.  The cliffs are falling away, eversoslowly, but falling nonetheless. The endless percussive push of the waves has carved out new caves, or they will be caves in a couple of hundred years.  For now, they look like a perfect semicircle of smooth basalt elbowed into the larval rock. The burns are dry.  No rain for six weeks and that isn’t good for the milk.  Lambs need milk, ewes need grass, grass needs water.  Simples.  There’s a wee concerto in there somewhere.  Let’s call it Synergy.  Or let’s not.  I can hear it whether, or no, we name it and, despite the sunshine on backs and faces, it plays out in a minor key.  A, I think. 

I startle a Meadow Pipit drinking from a puddle of mountain rescue, spring water from way up there where the sky begins, that will bubble up from the deep and sonorous ground as it has for centuries, and spill from the open lips of a rock that is now stuck with the job.  All other rocks kept their lips sealed. At the source I can hear the bubbling and the timpani and the tune and the rhythm.  Bog plants surround it, Kingcups too, Creeping Jenny, Yellow Pimpernel and Water Avens.  The colours would take yonks to mix on a palette and I still wouldn’t get there. I’d need endless mediums to help me compose a rapture, and they’ve all dried up from lack of use.

Sunrise this morning #4am was stunning.  I can see both from here, the rise and the fall into the sea.  That’s what happens, seriously.  The sun sinks, reddens, fires up the sky, sinks, reddens some more and then slides into the Atlantic in complete silence.  We are silent too.  There are no words for this.  Only music.  D, I think, major, but with an Elton John twist which means you never really know what base chords to play.  I have spent hours working out some of his musical texture on my wee piano and have decided he is a god.

Sometimes in life, there is only music.  When words are just jibber jabber, or not enough, or contrived, or used in defence or for control or to facilitate abuse, music is always faithful.  I listened, open minded but wary, once, to Disturbed singing The Sound of Silence.  I thought, Silence?  Disturbed?  No chance.  But I listened and what I heard made me gasp in awe.  That big tattooed man festooned with earrings and other rings in other places sang with such gentle power that I almost forgot Simon and Garfunkel. It was almost, no, it was, that I heard the words for the first time.  ‘And the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls.’  Ouch.  They still are. When I think about going home to caring, I blanche (B Minor) but it is what I will do.  And it is honest and true and my life and shut up about it.  Although my break in this beautiful and loved swathe of clifftop madness has felt too short, it may not be.  My encounters with the music of the land, in my reading, in my sewing, all ‘withoutus interruptus’ has been quite marvellous, but none of us can play forever.  Life is boots and buttoning up and old songs and a storyline that needs music to bring it back to life.  Could be Bach, could be Disturbed. I’ll take both home with me.

I met a young friend recently and she with a life full of work and two little girls told me she had forgotten music, its power in her life and her need for it.  I know those times, when we let ourselves drift into the functional, thinking that if we do it better tomorrow then we will feel good again, but we never do, no matter how much bettering we bring to bear. If we go faster, plan more concisely, answer texts quicker, get to the shop earlier and so on and so on, then we will get a gold star.  Sounds like a Prokofiev violin to me.  It has no nourishing provenance, that thinking, and yet we think it, nonetheless.

I watched two kayaks move through the sea.  One of the men is a friend.  He had told me of this voyage from Glasgow to the island and that it would take a week, best guess. The chance of me taking a clifftop walk at exactly the moment they were passing is music.  I watched what I thought at first was a lunatic white bird diving over and over again.  I have seen this, to be fair to me, way out there when seabirds find a bait ball, aka, a huge ball of sand eel, terrified into a circular pack because the dolphins are herding them up from below.  The birds see it and in they dive.  Over and over, and it does look like they are all jumping on a salty trampoline, from a distance.  Anyway, this was too regular, so I looked harder.  One white paddle. One black, two kayaks.  I stayed to watch them round the point.  I chuckled as I considered this.  Men rounding the point.  I know plenty like that.

I’m listening, now, to ‘that greatest of all love affairs, a violin and a human body’ (Mary Oliver).  Joshua Bell.  To my mind he is the best.  Although he plays the notes long written down, the quavers, crochets and the ones without stalks, he adds his gypsy self.  He plays games with phrasing, squishes them up and then pulls them out like soft toffee.  I chuckle whenever I recognise his naughtiness come through a piece I have heard a zillion times, and he lifts me into a closer listening.  Actually, I want to dance.  I want to shout Yes!  A brilliant rebel!  I love brilliant rebels, perhaps because I am one myself, (and we are thin on the ground) although I have often wondered what I am rebelling against.  My mother asked me that once – no, many times.  At first, I listed the usual.  Rules, Domination, A Government that’s all fur coat and no nickers, Radio Four, School, Lack of Choice, Oppression, Hypocrisy, Allbran, Semolina, and so on.  Latterly I would just be honest.  No idea Mum, and she would roll her eyes, turn away and sip her drink but with, I noticed, a little smile curling her mouth into an African upside-down moon.  There was music in that too.

I walk the mile to the Wifi Hut, and, as I arrive at the steadings through an open gate. I hear music piping through the metal posts. The score lifts and luffs on the back of the wind, hitching a ride to the other side of nowhere but deviating through a man-made hole, like a brilliant rebel, to sing a few notes just for me.

I want to write about awe.  There’s not enough awe going around these days.  That natural uplift of a heart on seeing something gaspish.  Gaspish is an unmeasured thing.  Not all of us gasp at the same thing, and some of us have learned not to gasp at all, but this could be something to do with the lack of teachers in the art of awe.  Everyone needs one of those.  Could be mother, could be father, grandmother, grandfather, friend, even foe.  Awesome, on the other hand, is a well and truly overused word, and words like that, when navigating the world through the mouths of a culture, often lose their strength, for a while at least, through such overuse.  ‘Cool’ was one, once, but the days of cool being cool are long gone unless from the lips of grannies who have only just caught up with the trend.  In our day ‘cool’ related to things in the fridge, a chilly morning or a nice G and T of a summer’s evening.

Awe comes unbidden.  It isn’t contrived or staged.  It just bombs the bejabers out of you when you are looking the other way, or, as in the case of almost everyone between the ages of ten and 40, at your mobile phone.  It stuns for a moment.  Something you never expected has just happened.  It could be the distant hills turning blue in jacklight, or a heron flying backwards or someone at your door with flowers.  The thing about awe is that it’s the result of something you never saw coming.  Like waking up to sunshine or waking up at all.  It could be knowing that someone is thinking of you just when you thought the world had finally self-destructed and you were the only one left in it with no wellies or torch and your laptop out of juice.  It could be an act of random kindness on a train, in a street or from behind a Costa counter when you are one penny short of a macchiato. It could be anything.  The key is to feel it, and there might lie the rub, whatever that means. 

I know that the wise writers and teachers of this world urge us to practice.  To recognise awe and to honour it with a gasp, that outing of breath the colour of respect.  We listen, we read about it, we forget.  Our lives are sooooooo busy, after all, what with the domestic off sick and the bins needing a controlled roll down the hill because tomorrow is Monday and our day for the green one.  Time is of the essence.  Yes, it is, but Time moves on whether we watch it or not.  Time will never be lost, but we can be if we don’t remember awe and gasping.  I watched a fulmar cant in a luff of Atlantic wind.  I watched it soar, steady itself, float and soar some more.  I felt tears.  How can this beautiful creature do that, as if doing that was as simple as me buttering toast?  How does it see anything from up there, let alone everything?  Where are its young, its mate, and how does it pick fish from the sea when fish are moving and tiny and all I can see is a fishless flat ocean?  I follow a bumble bee as it tries to relocate its burrow.  Do bumble bees forget where home is?  It looks that way to me.  There is a lot of buzzing intent, and I can almost hear the sigh of relief when it finally scuttles down a finger sized hole. 

I see my grown children, my handsome sons, my beautiful daughter, smile into my inbuilt camera.  They are mine and yet they are not mine at all, but I am in awe of who they are and what they have done.  Perhaps only I know parts of their stories, the tough bits, and felt their pain soothed under mother hands.  Perhaps.  As I walk, I hear a thrush.  I’ve heard her before, and she is bothered with my walking.  I am too near her nest.  She flies out beyond and calls to me.  Not there, she says, you silly twit.  My nest is not there, not where you are looking.  She knows how to do this go away thing……but how? I remember a new born peering up at me through half blind eyes because I was the one, the protector, the woman whose trashed-up womb nourished and held him close whilst he silently grew into life. That awe never leaves a mother, no matter what happens as he fights his brave way through childhood, past awe-less teachers and cruel playground taunts and on into trainers big enough for me to lie down in. Even the taste of coffee can gasp me, and not because it’s hot.  And that gasp, that awe is connected tightly to the absolute certainty that there are millions of people, women, men, children, who are lucky if they get the cool dregs, let alone a new hot cup all to themselves.

Awe.  Gasp.  Notice.  Remember this.  Remember it when you are knee deep in grubby sheets daily, discarded crusts of bread and other detritus that hit the floor and stayed there. Remember this when you can’t find your glasses in order to read an email, or the phone as it rings and rings and rings until it stops somewhere in the depths of a sofa cushion, bits of old bolognaise stuck to it forevermore.  Remember this when life feels like a great big stone around your ankles, too heavy to move, too limiting to ignore.  Remember and be thankful.  For I have watched a fulmar cant in a luff of Atlantic wind, way out there where rocks are really faraway islands, where the sea stretches right up to the skyline and where old stories hover like gulls overhead, just begging to be pulled down and told again in a new voice. Remember, when the BT engineer doesn’t come nor the builder, nor the friend who said she would.  Because if we allow apathy to become our friend, caught up in all that is overwhelming, real and right here right now, we may forget too much.

Like the watching of a drinking bird, balanced on a rock, dipping for a drop and tipping for a swallow, one, two, three times against a wide sky, vulnerable, on edge, and then lifting into space, like it can live in two worlds at the same time.

The cottage sits on craggy ground, a couple of miles from anywhere else.  The peace of the wilderness surrounds it, and, for 6 days, me too.  A black house, once, the walls are 3 foot thick and built with old stone, for stone is always old.  Full of stories too.  Whoever lived here in a time when the greatest intelligence was inside the brain instead of fleeing about upsetting migrating birds and the natural development of children knew how to protect his family against the bonkers west coast weather, the cold and the long dark winters.  He might have been a fisherman and his wife might have trekked down the cliffs for seaweed, dragging her salty burden back up to the potato patch, to lay it down over the precious earth, hopeful of a good feed for the following autumn and beyond.  Children would have walked miles to school along narrow tracks, over boulders, through rushing burns and grasses thick with orchids and all the worts.  The fisherman had a boat, but no engine.  He had his intelligence and his experience only to guide him.  Life was tough but life was enough back then. More than.

I feel the underfloor heating warm the soles of my feet.  I hear the strains of Debussy’s Girl with the Flaxen Hair emanating from the CD player, reminding me that once, when I was a young mother with long chestnut tresses and a girlish hope in my heart, an old man gave me that title.  He was a woodworker, fashioning tables and stools from old ship’s timbers.  I still have the hexagonal side table he made for me from solid oak with my initials carved on the top.  I remember him with his huge battered overcoat, worn in all weathers and secured around his midships with a length of orange binder twine, the flourish of a sailor’s knot dead centre. Broken boots he wore on his feet and his fingernails were always black, and, on his head, a pork pie hat, one he said he found on a bit of wasteland and rather fancied.  It was too small, but he bothered not about that. 

Outside the grasses tremble in the breeze.  They are too short to do more than tremble.  I Don’t recognise them.  A few miles away, where I live in an equally sturdy old stone house, though not as old as this one, we don’t have these grasses.  We have manicured gardens.  We have pulled out all that looks weed-ish and arranged our stones in pretty lines or curves, just so.  Out here where there is almost endless space, the end being the Atlantic Ocean, there is room for all growing things, some indigenous, some imported from exotic locations by previous owners of the estate.  The current young keepers of this land are more clued up about climate change and the dangers to wildlife of manicured gardens, as they are about recycling, migrating bird protection, eco friendly washing products and the waste of energy.  I applaud them, for it is so much harder to sustain enthusiasm for mindful attention to the weakening cries of our planet than it is to have the TV running all day and to throw out yesterday’s left-overs just because they’re yesterday’s, or to whack up the heating instead of knitting a big jumper made from sheep and then putting it on.

Geese graze the hillside, one that is bedecked with mothers and their lambs, for this is lambing time.  Ewes call for their recalcitrant young.  They’re over there, I tell them, in that big tumble of little white ones, running together, leaping and racing across the sunshine grass and paying absolutely no attention to the yelling of their mothers.  Much like my own children when I mistakenly tried to summon them from whatever exciting game they were involved in.  Mothers and timing do not make good partners.  Everyone knows that.  A Pied Wagtail bobs on a fence post and the air is a chirrup of Goldfinches.  There must be hundreds here.  Strange looking black flying insects with legs hanging down cluster around the wild fushia but never land.  I have no idea of their mission but, as they are there all day, I guess they do.  I sit on a driftwood bench and lean my back against the old stone wall.  It’s warm and there’s a heartbeat.  I can feel it and it calms me.  All the angst of arranging a 6 day break drains away as my own heart matches the beat.  The food plan, the carer plan, the wifi plan, the dog food plan, the this plan and the that plan seem a lot more than 7 miles and one day away.  I can see the point of land on which I live over there in the distance, between where I stand and the blue hills of Rhum, Eigg and Muck.  To my left after a walk I see Gunna, Coll and the Treshnish Islands which will now be alive with nesting puffins, shearwater, guillemots and shags.  Chaos, or it sounds like it as the boat nears the islands, an ear-splitting sound, or many sounds from many beaks and they all seem to be able to hear the call of a mate.  It amazeballs me. The cliffs, the scary high cliffs will have a nest on every ledge and the guano spills will turn the stone white ere long.  Puffins, the frock coated gentlemen of the bird world arrive with beakfuls of sand eels and scurry with a grunt down their respective burrows, making us all laugh at their comedic faces. 

Here I can read all day if I choose, or walk or sleep or write.  I don’t have to make space for myself for space is already here and free for the taking.  I inhabit it and in turn, it inhabits me.  Troubled thoughts come, of course they do for I cannot wipe my mind that quickly, but the anxious self- questioning is becoming a very small whisper, like a wee puff of smoke that soon dissipates in the wind. I know that in my experience of a shared life I was not allotted much space.  Agreed I didn’t fight for it, thinking in a traditional sort of way that a wife comes second and has no chance of overtaking.  However, I have pondered long on this subject and never wanted to be first, as in beating someone else to the prize.  I just wanted enough space to be whoever I turned out to be instead of turning into a woman who is the direct result of being confined inside her life by another or others.  It wasn’t on offer however and it is only just now that I can see how simple it is (and indeed might have been back then) to make space for myself by myself and without a single angry demand or noisome whine. 

I will end with a quote from the book I am reading again and loving all over again.  Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, by Peter Hoeg, in Miss Smilla’s voice:-

‘I feel the same way about my spatial freedom as, I’ve noticed, men feel about their testicles.  I cradle it like a baby, and worship it like a goddess.’

In this land of caring, I often find myself too tired for toffees. Although I am on the case, the case itself scoots off in random directions at a second’s notice. Needs are immediate in the mind of one with dementia and, I confess, the schoolmarm in me comes to the fore if I am busy doing what was in the original plan for the morning, or the afternoon, or the evening. It thinks me of times when I could sit for four hours writing my book, undisturbed (but only as the result of a strongly voiced back-off), or settle down to read a few chapters of some fine book, or, even, to lay down the rolls of paper for a Christmas wrap-up. Those days are long gone now in the blast of immediate needs.

Being the only one now who greets a door knocker, or answers the phone, or speaks with a carer on what to do this day, to name but 3 of hundreds of additions to my daily job, is exhausting. Physically, I am fit and agile, strong and versatile in a most practical way, but mentally, emotionally I am often scunnered. Someone once said, I think as a compliment, that he could hardly believe I could sustain consistent cheerfulness over long periods of time, like years. I understood what he meant. Part of this cheerfulness is innate. Part learned behaviour. Part sewn in to the pattern that is I, or is it me? I observe carefully others who rise above their own desire to run, or to murder, or to just turn the world off, even for a blessed hour or two, and then I work out how to achieve that for myself, inside my own set of circumstances. It isn’t just stamina, it’s stamina with a positive attitude and that is quite a different thing.

Living in someone else’s life was never my plan, although I do concede that any marriage requires a personal sacrifice to some degree or other. I feared, oh, many times, that I would turn into pretty wallpaper, lose my voice, my dreams, myself, and, to a degree, I have, but only to a degree and the great news is that these losses are all rebuildable, like cells in a body. Like the body, the mind can regenerate as long as it stays open. So, how to stay open when the denial of self reads as an absolute? I keep writing, for one. I keep reading for two. I create fantasy landscapes on tapestry canvas for three and for the rest, all the way up to ten, I have my children and grandchildren to keep the Tigger in me bouncy, bouncy, bouncy.

And…..I think sideways. Laterally, is the correct word for this way of thinking. If forward looks like a train wreck and backwards looks like a load of bad decisions, then sideways it is. There are hundreds of people, hundreds of opportunities in the side-lines, just waiting for a nod from me. Step forward, you! And they do. It thinks me of a long line of us all moving forward, but not alone. We don’t have to make eye contact. We just have to hold another’s warm hand as we face the wilderness together, feet marching to our own drums, and ready to lift anyone or anything that falters or falls, together. The way our culture seems to choose to live is alone, each one of us striving to achieve whatever is in our storyline, regardless of others. I believe this is a big error of judgement, for we are all linked by that single thread, and in moving together, we can create an fire unachievable by our own little candle held up against the hurricanes of our world.

Caring is sharing. So cheesy, but true. And, not only the ice cream but the sad stuff too, the mess and chaos of life, the demands and rejections, the rage and pain and suffering. Of course we all need time alone (thank God for respite breaks) but to think we can walk a rocky path alone however consistently cheerful we manage to be, is madness. I’ve tried it, determined that I should be able to do this all by myself. Should. One of my BIN words, along with Ought. Well blow that for a bunch of monkeys. I walk with my sideways friends, their gentle kindly thoughts, their spark and sparkle. Some lift out from the pages of a book, some from a movie, some as door knockers, and I welcome them all for they lift me out of my tired old boots and tell me that, just because I am not covered in feathers doesn’t mean I cannot fly, and, if I can fly, then so can they.

It is, I confess, hard to write of anything much after the death of a dear friend. It almost feels as if my words might read as tiddleypom against the Nothing; as if no word is important enough to lay down upon a page. And yet, write I must, for my soul needs it, and all words matter.

There is cloud shadow on the hills. Rain fell and stayed fallen, softening the earth, plumping it with moisture enough to nourish the dried old ground. Little seedlings, in a growth spurt, grabbed their chance to bid for the sky. Watching this heals a heart. A Greenfinch, rare visitor, checks me out from his wobble on the fence wire, and is gone. Children chatter and run from the school line, one glorious pink girl flying into my arms, wrapping her legs around my waist, excited and ready for a lollipop. I feed the little dog her supper and fill up the log basket for it is cold, yet, at night. Today is my eldest son’s birthday. He is 46 and yet, as mothers do, I remember his arrival as if it was yesterday, his toddling-hood, his O-levels and his marriage, the birth of his daughters. And the way he can go from A to Z without the rest of the alphabet knowing. Life, it seems, flies by. We have the understanding to measure time to within a billionth of a second and yet we have no idea what will happen in the next. It is a puckered life.

Connected with my reflections on his early years, is a thread of my own childhood. As newly orphaned child of the world, even at 66, it matters. There was a gap left by my dad two decades ago but mum strode on until she didn’t. Now I am flanked by nobody, and I can really feel it. Walking myself back towards the days of white socks and lollipops, I find a memory.

I remember when the sky changed, when it flew in through Dad’s open window, full of salt and excitement. The first to see the sea, to shriek her name out always won that precious gift of a father’s Well Done! At the house, piling out, all five of us. We stretched our little legs and, with our childish arms, pushed out the old home-spun boundaries as far as we dared. This was the start of 3 weeks of sand between our toes among strangers who knew nothing of our past mistakes or misdemeanours. The old picnic box, not seen for a whole year, opened to show a whole lunchtime in pale and darker green, each piece held tightly in place with leather straps and brass poppers. Wine glasses clamped to the lid threw rainbows as they caught the sun and laughed back. Unpacked, and having found our beds, laid down our teddies and our flowery summer nighties, we pulled on shorts and tees, threw our white sox of travel aside and pushed our brave toes into jelly shoes, lining up for the beach.

Everyone ready?? Hold hands now! And we were off, a string of excited children, learning how to walk anew and desperate to run towards the stall that sold spun sugar in pink clouds. The beach stretched for miles both ways and would lay down obligingly flat for us every single glorious day, just waiting for little hands to raise a fortress.

In the morning there is light. At night, there is dark. A natural process and, obvious to us all. No surprises there. As the world turns we lose and then we gain the burning light from our sun. The tides ebb and flow on a regular basis, pulled by the moon; we have breakfast on waking and supper before sleep. Beyond the odd deviation, such as a son-in-law who can eat reheated lasagne instead of cornflakes of a morning, we tend to stick to patterns long written down with a deferential nod to the historical family ‘bible’. Some of us break out, deciding not to continue such a dull and predictable daily plan, but, over time, many of us revert to type. We continue doing what we always did, what our parents did, seeing through a learned perspective a world we can understand and accept. Others may do it another way, but that is not for us. Let them eat cake, if cake is what they know and understand. Me? I prefer lasagne, and what they do is fine, as long as they do it over there on the other side of my garden gate.

Then something huge happens. It comes from nowhere. I never saw it coming at all. Suddenly, my landscape is a barren grey field of burning broken-ness. Suddenly, and it is always thus, I am stopped dead in my tracks. I have no idea what to do with this, nor myself. I am completely banjaxed. Such is a life when death comes like a thief. Not, this time, in my own life, but in that of a dear friend. One moment she is waving him goodbye-see-you-later-I’ll-cook-tonight, and the next she is opening the door to the bringer of the worst news ever. How can this be?

Her landscape, now, this light bright morning, is anything but light and bright. For her, this is darkness in the daytime. For her, there is no way forward, no view she has ever seen before, nor one she can understand at all. From the trench in which she now stands, knee deep in freezing water and scurrying with rats, she sees a war zone. Hopelessness. Burning. Cries of pain. I cannot imagine it. No shoes are right for this, no clothing warm enough, no words of consolation enough to separate her from the sure knowledge that she will never have to cook for him again.

I just listened to a Ted Talk (recommend them highly) on Grief. The speaker lost a baby, her father and her husband in the same year and she has made it her life’s work to study and then to teach about grief. Not moving on from it, but moving on with it. We say, at terrible times in another’s life that our own sadness palls into insignificance beside the terrible time, and, it does, but it doesn’t mean we should move on either. Whatever is a fallen field in our own lives, matters. Turning from the sadness doesn’t, unfortunately, make it go away. It simply buries it in the ashes of what once was vibrant with flowers. But, as we know, the earth moves and as she does, she thrusts up the long-buried bones of that sadness, that loss, that guilt, that shame, so that we are forced to face it all over again, and just when we thought we ran clear.

We can encompass so much if we look at life, our own life, other’s lives, the state of the world, all of it, as strands of the same thread, not opposing forces. Extreme grief can be felt for something in one life, that is like mist in the hurricane of another’s, and, yet, both matter. Grief over rejection, bullying, homophobic judgment, lack of success in business, a broken relationship, and so much more, can feel like the end of the world to the fly in the metaphorical web. It can dominate every single second of thought, change behaviour, choices, direction. It can kill.

I have not faced the ultimate grief, the sudden death of a beloved one, the shock of it. I can say nothing on the matter. My words would be as sickening platitudes were I to speak at all. So I won’t. But, I will say that in this world there are millions of grievers and every single grief matters. Moving on with that grief changes landscapes, breaks historical patterns and there is nothing wrong with that. Moving on, with the joy and with the grief that comes to every life, brings out a creativity in all of us, one that would never be tapped, nor developed had we never stood before the fallen field; had we never felt so very lost, so unequipped, so cold and weary and so broken.

The thread is one thread. Many strands, but one thread. Multicoloured, but one thread, and this one thread, this one chance of life, links us all together.

There are some wonderful words out there for the plucking and Cusp is one of them. In the dictionary it is explained thus;- ‘a pointed end where two curves meet, e.g. the horn of a crescent moon.’ Now that sounds like a fun place to be! I remember a picture of the man on the moon hanging by one buttock on just such a cusp. The image thinks me of many of us in many different situations, hanging there, not fully in one place, nor the other, but still, somehow, there at all.

Days seem to decide on themselves as they dawn. I have found that one day I am barely hanging on, and, the next, feeling like there is a whole moon beneath my tired old butt. I am high up there and looking down on a scurrying world. Today is such a day and I have no words to explain the difference. It doesn’t seem to be up to me, up to what I do or what I don’t do. It just is different. My thoughts are lighter, brighter and not because of me. No horrid nightmare played out whilst the dark surrounded me, only a sense of peace and acceptance, awakening refreshed and with a zoom in my heart. I no longer think ‘I can do this, or I can’t do this’. I don’t think at all. I just am.

Gentle music plays and the pangs of yesterday, the ‘what do I do with all these seedlings’ angst is now a shoulder shrug. There is time enough for seedlings yet. It’s still cold out there, and the garden will do what gardens do, whether or not I fret. In answer to the question ‘why do you have nightmares?’ I reply that caring is exhausting. He looks blank. How can he know what life is like for me, after all? He cannot know, and none of this is his fault. Yesterday I took myself back to the days of passion and laughter. I walked myself into memories that were the truth. I remember the thrill of seeing him framed in a doorway, the sound of his voice calling out my name. I remember longing to be with him, just us, away somewhere. I can still hear the sound of the land rover arriving in the yard and that huge sense of relief. All will be well, now, because of him, because he is back here, with me, with us.

I will not quibble with the way I feel today. I will not ferret about for explanations, nor will I make a plan to hold on to such a day, for it will escape me once more, as it always does. But, I will remember the moon and the cusp of a new one and the memories of what was, and be so very thankful that I have had what many never have.

And I will keep hanging on to the cusp.

I swing between the two every day. The scream inside is loud, but only to me. Outside of me the birds sing most singingly and the grass lies calmly flat (and in need of cutting). The sky is peaceful with blobs of cloud. There is no anger nor angst up there this morning, no sharp dashes of white against the blue. I check the new seedlings, having forgotten what on earth they are and they look back at me. We’re fine, they say, as they rise gently up from their boxed in royal mail squash of yesterday. All flop and drought they were then, but, after a goodly drink of rainwater from the barrel, they have relocated their perk.

I search for my own. Perk, that is. In spite of a recent two days away from the daily grind of caring, I am not as easily revived as my nameless seedlings. I, like them, feel the chill in the air, but unlike them, water is not enough. I book a week away in a remote cottage on a cliff. At first, once I have pressed play on such a commitment, I am euphoric. A whole week with just me, the sea, the sky and nature, books and watching and walking. No caring. Then, as my decision sinks its teeth into me, I feel the rise of guilt. How do I speak out this decision? I am greedy, yes, that’s what it is, restless, unable to complete my task without sprinting for the hills. How weak. How pathetic. What is WRONG with me? And, while we are at it, define ‘grind’.

I struggle to. The bright and breezy carers come in a few times a day. They sort what I no longer have to sort, to a degree. I have a weekly cleaner and someone to cut the grass. I am very privileged. But, what nobody knows, nobody, that is, who is not caring for a partner or parent full time, is what goes on inside a carer’s head, and that is where all the storms rage on. Guilt, frustration, sadness, panic, all wear running shoes with leaden soles. Living with someone who is slowly (very slowly) leaving the planet is a massive strain. We carers are taught by well-meaning advisors to learn how to inhabit the world of the one with dementia. We must practice until perfect the art of separating the person from the illness. All well and good, but nobody tells me how to sustain this tippytoe way of living for decades. As the cared for one declines, I must rack up my caring skills, even if I am exhausted, frustrated, sad and panicky; even if my fed is thoroughly up; even if I wake to another day of clearing up, sorting out and mending everything cracked or broken; even if I am exhausted and my brain, once sharp as a needle is now blunted into submission. I forget words, people’s names, where my car is parked and there is absolutely no end in sight.

So, of course I am justified in taking a week off in May, to myself, and another in June. That is as far as my courage has taken me so far. July can hang on a bit, but I know it is important, nay, critical, that I do meet up with July to discuss a mutual plan. Look after yourself, the well-meaners say, but without a word on how I do that. In Tapseteerie days I told myself I had to keep going. That’s what the world expected of me, ditto my husband, mother and mother in law. It’s what they all did after all, through wars and hungry days, crazy demands and no internet. Any show of weakness was, therefore, unacceptable, to me, to everyone. Besides, if I went down, then so did Tapselteerie. I reflect on what that staunch, well-booted up attitude cost me, and it was a lot. So.….duh….? Ah, but it is so easy to spout logic from a place of inexperience, returning, as the well-meaners do, to that safe place back home, where there is some sort of order and a week ahead to map out with confidence, a place miles away from the house of dementia.

To all of you who care in this way, or who ever have, I salute you. Actually, the very thought that you are out there at all makes my feet want to skip, not because I wish this on any living soul but because it means I am not alone. I can learn from you, the way you accept and smile and keep going. Perhaps this keeping going thing is what makes it all worthwhile, lifts the drudge and calms the storms?

Ok, I’ll buy it. Again.

Some days Time stands still here. There are four old clocks tic-tocking away, all saying different things, but I am used to that. Old clocks and Time have a personal relationship of which I know nothing. They are of another century, and we all know how indulging we are around those of another century. One of them shoots off into the next hour without any guilt, clutching on to youth perhaps, whereas another holds back and arrives with a ding dong ages after the hour has passed. I used to faff and fiddle about correcting them, like, this is Wednesday and Wind Up day and you are almost a day behind/ahead…………but, now, I don’t bother. They are free to do what they like. I like their perception of Time. And, it is, to be truthful, only ever a perception. God thinks in gazillions of centuries and we ferrety little mortals who imagine that our life is THE life, get our panties in a knot over minutes, even seconds. Late for work = nil points; early for a first date = overly keen. Always a negative judgement in there somewhere.

Anyway, back to me. The mornings are busy tiddley-pom with washing and wiping and firing up and laying out, not the dead, but the ship-shape plan for the day. Easy. Done. Then comes lunch and that’s when Time gets weary, and, sometimes stops. I crawl on till 2pm and when we get there, me and Time, I wonder if 2pm isn’t a dividing line between Everything’s Fine and Oh Crumbs! I think it is. I recognise it from Babyhood, not from my own, but around my many children, that lapse in the day when a 6 am start, parked light years in the past reached out to meet the afternoon/evening/night demands that felt like an oncoming army of Borg, with me in their sights. Resistance, as they say, is futile. And then there was me in the middle, confounded by Time, ruled by it, defeated and then elevated by it in equal measure, because, of course, once Time says It’s time, I am up and running like a sleekit cat across the hills of resistance and on, on, on, into the necessary.

However, now that I am a carer and the days are s l o w m o v i n g, I find 2pm a right pain in the aspidistra. I think, Oh Golly, there are many hours between this and bedtime and the afternoon yawns in agreement. Well thanks for that. I do a bit of this and a bit of that. I re-pot, plant out, bring in washing, sweep a floor, go upstairs to come downstairs, wipe something, read a bit, knit……Oh KNIT! Well, this knit thing has become my saviour. Between Yawning 2pm and Thank Goodness Bedtime at 8.30, I have discovered knitting. I have no idea what this length of knit-ness is, but what I do know is that is soothes me into the marvellous. All my troubles seem so far away whilst I knit a load of nonsense in the colours of the sea. It’s like I am knitting my own ocean and the feel of it in my hands is wild, when I think like that. The l o n g hours between 2pm and bedtime are fooled. Ha! I tell them. Do Your Worst. I have found a way around your irritating yawning and indolence. I a m b u s y knitting an ocean and I bet you have never managed to do that, you over there playing games with Time and thinking you are in control…..the pair of you…..one upstairs, still in yesterday, and you, half way up like Christopher Robin, lurching step by step into tomorrow……….

Well I am in Today. It is all I have, and it is my best shot at living. I know that. Everybody knows that.

The light around the window is but a shuffle, as though a child has drawn it and then tried to rub it out. 4 am, and the first bird is already out and about. Slowly the light strengthens, becoming more defined, more itself. Morning has broken. I rise to let her in. She floods my wooden floorboards and illuminates the room. There is no sign of darkness. Night has flown. I shower and dress, slap on the slap and head down for coffee. There is only me awake this early, only ever me and in my story, this isn’t early at all. I am diurnal as a member of a diurnal species, but I inhabit the darkness too. I may be unable to see with my eyes but my mind can always see, and what I see may be a bit dodge at times.

What we see and how we see is everything. Light is light and we take daily light as a given, for granted, for it will always come until it doesn’t any more, either when we die or when the world ends, and not one of us has a scooby when either will come to bear. For now I am not dead, and the world is still the world, spinning slow, rising and falling through the seasons, the wars, the disasters and the joys. We need the light to see the weeds that need pulling out, to see the smile on another’s face, to do our homework. But for those who live in constant darkness there is no outside light. For them, the inner light will lead. For the blind, the broken, the abused, the war victims, the abused, rejected and the starving, there is only that inner light, one that we who suffer not as they do, take for granted. We think this is it, this is all we need, this light from the outside, but we are wrong in our thinking. If we expect to be illuminated from any source other than our own hearts, we set ourselves up for disappointment.

The kindly light within is constant, day or night and we all have access to it. This light is not snuffed out by outside influences, or not for long, if it is tended and treated with loving care. This is the light that leads us through life, whatever life we are asked to lead. This light will guide us through any depth of darkness, any despair, any doubt, worries or wars. It will feed us when we starve, give us sight when we are blind, warm us when rejected or abused for it is a kindly light. External circumstances can chill us to the bone, can leave us lost and confused, but if this inner light is nourished, we will come through it all. Inner light is self love, compassion for others, a gentle acceptance of all things, all people. It is belief and belief is faith and faith is trust, not in what we see in daylight, but in what we cannot see.

So, lead, kindly light. It matters not what life asks of us. We are so much more than our circumstances and inside each one of us there is this shuffle of light that, with recognition and trust, will strengthen until it defines who we are and what we are really capable of.