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Island Blog – Just a Dog

Over the last weekend, the Poppy Dog was very sick, so much so that I had to take her over the switchback to the vet. Negotiating a series of chasm potholes, sharp upward twists and barely any passing places, we arrived. Poppy was to stay overnight to be on an IV drip as she was extremely dehydrated. Leaving her was tough even as I know the vets on the island are quite brilliant. I didn’t expect to collect her alive to be honest and made my wishes clear. I did not want her back as a sickly thing, not this feisty, barky dog, my wee mate, the only other one breathing within these four stone walls. No way.

Needless to say, my night was more day than night. Every hour I wondered how she was doing until Sleep left the building. Early morning, in the dark, I swear I heard Poppy snuffling in the next room. The vet called at 07.30 and I missed the call in the one moment I went out to gather wood against the fourth bl**dy freezing storm in a single week. The answerphone told me she had enjoyed a peaceful night, had not pulled out her drip and had eaten some chicken and rice for breakfast. I couldn’t believe it and my relief lifted into a lip cracking smile. A friend drove me over to collect her early this afternoon and, despite the spectacular wind emissions, Poppy was bright and waggy.

Needless to say we are both tired but happy. She is just glad to be back home and I, well I am full of gratitudinal thanks to the vets, the friend and the survival of my wee barky mate. Poppy is more than just a dog. She is the reason for walks, for conversations (a bit one-sided I admit)and for play. She is the over-the-top welcome when I have been away at the shop for 20 minutes. She is the one who wakes me in the night because her bladder is reminding her it needs emptying. She follows me everywhere, watching with those big velvet eyes where I go and, even before I do the ‘go’ thing, when I am only just thinking about it.

May she continue to mend, particularly in the wind emission department.

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Island Blog – About the Real

I walk into another evening alone. Oh yes I did have a great friend staying and other friends here making music, yes I did. And then they all go back into their shared lives. And I am so thankful they came. I loved the moments chuckled between us, the laughter, the conversations, the music. I really did. But after them there is just me, just the old loneliness.

In our ‘out there’ lives, we don’t mention loneliness and yet it is rife among us. We don’t want to speak out the word because it invites questions, or fixings, or mentions of Spring and daffodils and light. We see it coming so we keep quiet. We say we are fine and after a little chat about this, that and the weather, we turn back into the lonely. It doesn’t begin after the death of the one we shared everything with. No. It creeps in after the probate is sorted, the paperwork filed, the busy time that keeps us, well, busy and then stops dead like a train hitting the buffers. The shunt of silence is deafening and it isn’t going to make noise anytime soon, bar the odd visit of friends, the lift of music, laughter and shared time.

So what do we Lonelies do about this? Good question. I will work on it. Many of us are just short of 70. What options are out there for us, we who have stayed solid throughout maybe 50 or more years of being one of two? Well we may not be able to see them options but they might just be there, out there, somewhere. So what I say is this, as I wander, restless, through an empty house, more empty than it was when the other of two was away for a bit…..do you remember your dreams? I am working on that. Dreams I had as a young woman with no clue just don’t make sense now. However, a person without dreams, without aspirations, is basically dead whilst still breathing. It doesn’t matter what you do in the loneliness. But it matters if you do nothing. I catch the lift of the young woman I was, at 18, before marriage and kids and a most adventurous and demanding life subsumed me, or tried to. It never worked, this subsuming thing although it took all my spirit strength to remain Me. And now, on my own is mostly wonderful. I no longer have to say where I am going, nor when I will return. I no longer have to explain myself. I no longer this or that, and that is a void I do not know how to navigate. I was this woman and for decades. Now who am I?

There’s a question. The real is the truth. Lonely is real.

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Island Blog – Stories on a Backwind

It’s been ten days since I blogged, give or take. I blame my best friend because she and I have been here on the island together and there is much to talk about after a year apart. She hasn’t been able to leave, thank you Dudley, Eunice and Franklin, even as it irks me to buy into this nonsense naming of storms or winds. We were always quite the thing just acknowledging a new storm and for hundreds of years, as if we knew we could never tame, nor name them, so powerful and volatile were/are they. Nowadays they take on bowler hats or the memory of old grumpy great aunts who smelled of things nobody ever wanted to smell outside of a wheelie bin long uncollected.

Moving on.

The winds whip crazy this month, flipping from North to Northwest, to West and back to North. Sometimes the South pulls up her big girl knickers for a wee toot but she is up against the big winterboys so doesn’t get much of a word in. Occasionally I have met her on the Tapselteerie track, a sudden hug of warmth but she is wheeched away in seconds. I might walk backwards a step or two to see if she is still there because she was about to gift me a story, but no. She is gone. So what story did she carry on her back? I caught the first line but no more. That’s ok. She’ll be back soon enough.

However the winterboys carry stories too on their backs. If you look at where the wind is coming from and check out the country in line with the wind, you can hear the stories from Iceland where all the mythical stories began and beyond to Greenland. They know cold as ancient. And stories come from ‘ancient.’ Listen as you clothe up and bend against the hail stones. Listen to the slough-song of the wind. Let it blow through you, feel it on you skin and listen. No, not just listen, hear.

Most of the time I do this listen/hear thing and have no translation. Thing is, it doesn’t bother me at all. I am a tiddler in this walk through time, but I am here, I am a tiddler and I can engage. I might catch an image, see how it was when skinning an Elk was the biggest thing for that day. We, now, Elk free, can fight against the winterboys but we will never win. Nor will we master them with expensive outdoor kit nor giving them ridiculous taming names. The moment we can just thrill to the cold, feel the wind, walk out barefoot (just me I think) and really feel the whole craziness of winter life whilst listening to and hearing the windback stories, we are, at once, at home with the whole gamut of seasons.

Such a freedom.

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Island Blog – A Sylvan Lift

Woods. I recommend them. Among trees, my daily ‘among’ thing feeds my soul, lifts my feet, my heart. When I walked, careless and young, my hand inside my dad’s big warm palm, there were trees but I had no idea of their sentience. I knew they kept me from rain beneath their wide leafy branches. I knew they shaded me from the intense sun-punch. I knew I could climb through their limbs. I knew they lined our suburban street. Beyond that? Clueless.

Oh my, how I have learned over time, so much, so very much. Even the street trees, those ones pushing through the confines of concrete paving slabs in shopping centres, even they have a voice and a story and more, something wonderful and something healing to share. However, my daily walk is into wild woods, no people, only the trees, the deer tracks, the otter spraint, the lift of a a snipe, although I only heard a flutter from the bracken as I walked and the flash of a lifting bird.

I turn to where the track lifts kindly gentle past horse chestnuts and up to the beeches. I say hallo my friends, as I always do. They are quiet for now as a big hooha of a hail storm has passed on through and the sky ahead is promisingly blue-ish with only a few flattened clouds, stunned I decide from the slam of sudden hail arriving on the back of a cold wind. I may just make the whole walk before the next one arrives, which it always does. On I go past the politely fallen pine, 20 paces long I count. One big limb hangs over the road just high enough above it not to poke me in the eye, fingers canting down all bare and dead. Witches fingers. I call a greeting to Finneas and Magnus the only huge pines in the fairy woods who have given me their names. I round the corner and into the straight. This part of the sylvan scape is flanked solid with hazels and birches, the chorus line. Hallo ladies, I smile at them, feeling the usual urge to burst into song, and stop to study another fallen giant, this time a beech and this one still living despite the man-high curve of yanked out roots. Its fall is held in the arms of what looks like an Eucalyptus judging by its bark. The beech fell, arms wide and this beautiful saviour caught it slap bang in the belly. Although the beech, a huge one, did make contact with the ground, the saviour may well have kept it breathing still. Eventually, I am guessing, this holding up thing will exhaust the saviour and I suppose even saviours have a life span.

Where the track curves back on itself there is another beech of whom I am particularly fond, the one who grew straight out from a rock face, turned straight for the light and who now is almost taller than the others that surround it. Brave woman, I say, as I always do. You think me of me, of many women, of all the courage and sheer determination that ensures life goes on, no matter the difficulties. As I head back for home I greet Lord and Lady Larch, Archie Larch and his girlfriend the Alder. She’s shy I think as she is always quiet when I go by. Their limbs are so intertwined that I find it hard to work out who owns which. But, no matter. They are happy together and that’s all that counts. I see the lichen, green, white, orange, the different mosses on the drystone walls, the fallen wood and in the stands of rainwater. So much colour and life.

A warbler warbles at me as I come down the last stretch. I stop to find it, but I never do. Tits chatter in the sycamores, skittering like children when school is out. One flies overhead and there is a little something in its beak, something like a feather. Nesting has begun already. As I open my door and feel the rush of inside warmth, I am smiling, refreshed, rejuvenated and ready for a cup of tea. As I sip it and reflect, I can sense a change in me, a calming peace, a sylvan lift.

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Island Blog – Conundrums and Palindromes

An intriguing subject and today I realised something whilst pondering the grammar I so oft forget even as I knew it like I knew my own self a hundred years ago, could navigate its complexities and dark alleyways, its sharp and tantalising edginess, its opportunities for a witchy twist. I still feel that but now I need to let a ferret loose in my thick small print Oxford dictionary, even if it needs a serious upgrade. With all the new language, the new ways of saying the same thing the Greeks said but with different spelling, I can see that my dictionary is a very old man, dusty smelling and wonky chops at his edges, bless his old falling apart interior.

However, it thinks me about life, the subject of conundrums and palindromes. So many many times a conundrum taunts us, challenges us, confines us. Then, if we pause ad reflect we see the palindrome, that what challenges us spells the same way forwards or backwards, telling us that there is a see-saw in the problem. From one end it is all about win or lose but once we see the whole see-saw, we can understand the whole thing. Just a see-saw. Just an up and down and another and another.

I remember see-saws with my kids and my grandkids, the same bump on the same ground as I downed heavier than them but cautioning my downing. and then my uplift. Life, I thought, and learning.

If we can understand that when life slants us off kilter with a conundrum and then in kindliness offers a see-saw palindrome, thus gifting us the chance to monitor our bump down and our uplift, then we can deal with whatever comes our way. There will be endless number of weights that confound and upset us; yes. And here we are on the see-saw. On the other end there may be impossible weights and hitting us at times we don’t expect and feel we are not ready for, but we can hold tight to our end of that board and can learn to work with balance. Whatever comes, comes. Who we are and what we decide to do about who we are in the circumstances will decide not who or what wins, but so much more.

We will understand that we spell the same, forwards or backwards.

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Island Blog – Call on Pooh

Although I always awaken with Tigger bouncing in my head, even that striped loon can change shape as the morning unfolds. I never know how it will be until it decides for itself. It isn’t to do with what I do nor what I don’t. It isn’t about the weather, the season or my best laid plans. I can continue to bounce until even I get tired of the bounce thing, all the way up to evening, or I can feel myself turning grey. On the outside of me, I laugh at this. It’s the same for everyone else isn’t it you daft old eejit? Your grey slump is not new, nor is it original enough to warrant a voice. No, it is just a grey slump. Get on with it. You could, if you subscribed to self-pity, find a load of reasons to explain this. Or you can try to outrun it by attaching yourself to Blue (the marvellous hoover) or a bucket and mop or the iron or a pen. Third option. You could just stop running, stop searching for the reasons for grey, and let go. It is allowed.

I paragraphically distance myself from this conversation, as you can see. I have never been good at allowing myself such an indulgence, as I see it. Oh, I am really good at this allowing thingy with everyone else. It thinks me. Am I perfectionist? Well, maybe, because my standards for myself are as high as the sky and equally unreachable. I look up. Everything up there is doing what it does, naturally and adaptively. Clouds move because the wind moves them. Sun rises and falls, ditto the moon, all naturally. Down here it’s not so easy to adaptively flow. Our wonderful brains make mince of us if we are not in charge of them. We are also impatient and expectant and judgemental, often and mostly of our own selves. I find it reassuring to know that the grey hits each one of us, not that I wish it on a single living soul.

Today began with Tigger and became Eeyore by 0800. He’s a sad old sausage, tail gone plus other losses. Imagined? Possibly. Then I considered the stories lived out in the 100 acre wood. That is quite a wood by the way, and an opportunity to be lost for days. Moving on. Each of the friends find each other, seek each other out so that no distress remains thus for long. They are a team.

I believe that the writer fashioned each creature on the moods of a human. Winnie the Pooh, happy with everything in life, every opportunity a gift; Piglet, scared and lacking in confidence; Eeyore believing that life itself worked against him; Rabbit, tense, anxious and fearful; Kanga the mother, the carer, the soother of troubles; Roo, well, Roo is just Roo; Old Brown trying so hard to control whatever comes his way and failing and Tigger the jester. We all know all of them. We experience them all. What might trouble us, and troubles me is that I want to be always Tigger or Pooh but I cannot control that (Old Brown). Life has a life of its own and all we can do is to be okay about cloud thinking in the face of whatever wind decides to luff into power. Yes we must plan, yes we must take action, yes and yes. But when Tigger turns into Eeyore before the school run, then we might consider leaning into the grey, which, by the way, takes forever to create on the palette, more than 7 colours and in such cautious amounts that it is very easy to turn it into slump mud if distracted.

So when Tigger becomes Eeyore, call on Pooh. Always works for me.

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Island Blog – Finding me on Sundays

I’m not sure I like Sundays. I notice more things I don’t want to notice, such as nobody here and nothing on the cards and the wrinkles on my fingers and those bone-age knuckles that would need no ‘duster’ to take out a big man, had they the strength. Saturday, now, passes like a slip of a thing when Saturdays were always more of a yahoo. I don’t think that helps.

Sundays in my young past were a hair wash/get ready for school panic; or a back to work dread. Saturdays were always better. No preparation angst rising like indigestion. It was just a yahoo with crazy plans and sauncy clothing and opportunities, even as a daughter/married woman/wife, when me and him would often suddenly book a dinner table somewhere, just because it was Saturday and Sunday gave enough room for the aftermath. Now Sundays offer the same but without the Saturday fun. Doesn’t really work for me. Funny that I am still stuck in that life calendar.

This is my 3rd winter without him. Although I am, mostly, okay about ‘tempus fugit’, it feels like I am fumbling about, my fingers combing through the times, the timeline, and bringing up nothing more than seaweed or old hair as from a drain. Even as I grow into someone I never knew, nor recognise, I have this pull back to the past. Let me go there, let me have what I had; that sort of nonsense thinking. But, nonsense or not, it is how it is. This bereavement/grieving thing has no shape, no tidelines, no dateline. It is the weirdest of all times of my life as it is for anyone else who knows what the heck I am talking about. There is an identity loss, that identity having been set in place decades ago, refined, pruned, nurtured and encouraged to bloom. It will never be easy to ignore that, nor to walk away. New identity? What on earth does that mean? But, we find it, I am sure, because so many have.

And I am ready to love Sundays, to learn and to find a new me, no matter how hard the work.

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Island Blog – She’s so right.

This day we got soaked, twice. That’s probably a fun thing in the eyes of someone without shelter, warmth or security. I write ‘We’ and it stranges me. I haven’t said or written we for 18 months, nor ‘our’. Our garden. We do it this way. Our home. We like this or don’t like that. That separation is a tear. A tare. A pervasive weed in the cornfield. I remember them way back in Norfolk days and the faffdiddle pain in the backside thingy about us having to walk into the crop in order to remove the invaders. For acres and acres and all the way up to the horizon. T’was the only way.

Inside the rain, there are choices. I, no, we, but not the old we, were soaked in seconds and twice, as the heavenly rain canted sideways and upwards and fickledraft and slanty-sneaky in the short minutes from car to home or t’other. I had to change twice. But I could. I have options. I can warm. I can find safety. I have a change of underpinnings and overpinnings. Just saying.

The day, a day no doubt exhausted with all the rains of our island life in these times, slips into nightfall. It’s dark now. I close the curtains and whisper a thank you to the day, one I shared, one I felt alive in, got soaked in, laughed with others in. All of that.

I know that life lives on and it does, I see it, get soaked in it. But I also remember the we of me and I smile, I cry, I value what I had. Different now, ally mango but I like different.

A quote from an author I so admire. Sally Magnusson, from her moving book The Sealwoman’s Gift.

‘grief is not a rough stone the tides will polish in time but a storm that may abate but always returns, fiercer and angrier for the lull.’

And, she’s so right.

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Island Blog – I am alive

And so it rains again, sideways and spiralling like wet smoke. I watch islanders walk by attached to damp dogs, legs all a-skitter. The humans are water clad, their faces shining rosy, their laughter lifting into the sky as they share a chuckle, again, about the rain, again. Visitors drive by, droop-faced, vision misted, windscreen wipers tick-tocking to keep the skinny road clear ahead. Where will they go today to see notverymuch I wonder? Inside the heating warms me, the fire curling amber red flames around the dry wood that spits and crackles; timpani. This is the island, the one that tongues far out west, dividing the Atlantic with its basalt and granite determination. I am content.

Walking out to feed the jittery birds sinks my feet into the sodden grass but no weather stops the need to feed their hunger. They scoop and swoop in, wary of the neighbour’s cats, of the sparrow hawk dive. I watch them cluster around the swinging feeders and am thankful that my meals are easier to access and without danger. I hear the drip drip of a ceiling leak, the plink of the drops as they land in an enamel jug. I used to need buckets, four of them, but not now, not since the ingress was located and bunged shut. And so I am thankful for that. Soon the day will kick off, unfold, pull me here and follow me there. I have music, words, timpani, birds, windows and rain. I am alive.

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Island Blog – Really

This morning I walked beneath the Still. The Still is a strange creature up here, on an island where winds reckon they can leap into any old mood, and without warning and without informing the helpful/not helpful weather apps on my phone, neither of which agree with each other. Much like the winds. Hallo, my friends, I say to the trees. Well done, you are still standing. They say nothing, holding in stasis. But they, unlike I and my schoolboy weather apps, just know more wind is coming.

I meet said wind this afternoon on another walk. Oh, Hallo my friends, you are dancing to the new beat, the beat of this wind, this not-yesterday wind, nor to the beat of a gale…….Oh shutup about that gale, they wheeshed at me and, ps, there is no beat to a gale, only rant and shout and punch and all of it beat-less, rhythm-less. I chuckle and bow to their deeper knowledge, and then I ask them, do you know when a gale is coming, a storm? The trees roll their eyes at me. Duh!

I walk on looking up to where the bony branches move and dance and sway and bend to a force they know of old even if I never quite know; one which has pounded skies and islands, seas and trees for centuries. Honestly folks, it is never going to change. The elements are four things we can contain, shut out, hide from, even deny, but never control. Not never (love a double negative) but only prepare for as best we can. Back in the days when humans just knew, feeling the change in smell, in the sky, in the behaviour of animals, who still work with the elements, we would plan our days so differently. We would be in tune with the forces that, even inside a city, could be our guides, our helpers and our warnings. Like the trees.

Did you know that trees will send more strength to their roots when they know a gale is coming? Did you know that they will also enhance the root support already in place for a weaker tree so that it might survive the gale? Check out The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. It will astonish you. This is why I talk to the trees. There is the overstory, that’s me in my boots and then, oh then, there is the understory which is astonishing.

Anyway. I stop to hear their song in the afternoon, watch the knuckle bare winter branches comb the wind. I hear their song, one for beeches, a different one for silver birches, another for hazels. I call them (the hazels) the chorus, and they have pulled me up on that. I explain that being one of a chorus is an individual role. Each one of you is important. Without you, or you, there would be no choir. They settle at that. I move on to the pine tops, singing away, slicing the grey sky with needle fingers and with their stop point half way to Mars (swaggering actually) but I get it. If I was 100 feet up there, I just might feel pretty good about myself. I watch tits dart from pine to pine, from fir to fir and it thinks me. This whole woodland knows itself. It knows what it needs and how to get it and it has held that knowing for centuries. We think we know how to live together.

Really?