candles

by

Island Blog. – That’s my guess

There’s a time and it comes as the night pushes down the day and takes over. Before, when they argue with each other, the clouds tangle and squish, bumping against each other like school kids in a lunch queue. Inevitably the dark wins. How could it not, pushing down like that, an easy pressure, whereas, just saying, the light has far harder work? Dawn has to push up, after all. I think of Dawn with strong shoulders, her determination strong. She’s been doing this for millennia. Let’s hope she doesn’t get tired of the whole pushing night away thing.

Once night has squashed all of the light, I move me towards music and candles. It isn’t a stoop of my shoulders, more an invite to a new dance. The fire is fiery, licky flames thankful for the island timber, those old trees felled, usually by some storm with a dinky name. Eish the nonsense in that! A storm is a storm is all. I will never understand why there are pet names for such as storms, those massive and upwrenching take-out blasts of gargantuan force. We are, in my opinion, both foolish and blind to the truth of what is true. Nature will always win. We are almost irrelevant in that truth, but not quite, not those of us who learn, who are as prepared as anyone can be. It’s those who pretend it isn’t happening who concern me.

I went off on one there. I am not a worrier, not a fearty. I turn on the tunes, light the candles, begin to write. In this simple island life where roads may be passable in icy conditions, when a ferry may run, where rain falls a lot, when there are parking spaces in the harbour town, when everyone sees everyone else as an islander even if most of us are blow-ins, white settlers, whatever, even as we did choose to actually live here, to work here, to join the community and there is a strength in that. I think on that, as tunes play through my speaker, as my twinkly winkly lights twinkle and winkle. So simple. Enough, yes, enough. I walked today, twice, once with. a friend who laughed me a lot. We met muddy dogs, squelched through mud and the sharp stones of puddle refills. We talked of life and hope and christmas trees and future plans as we listened to the plop of raindrops on rhodie leaves, or from the ridonculous highs of Cyprus, Caledonian Pines, the Oldies in this place. The music of it, the beat, the laughter it brings, the musicality of Nature. Who hears it anymore with headphones on?

Community life is simple, bloody hard, difficult, awkward, challenging, slow moving, and wonderful. What else is real life but this? A confusion, an out of self. That’s my guess.

by

Island Blog – Candles, Perception and Stories

I love candles. In the dark times, and it is here, the dark. On this beautiful island, once you know the heartbeat of the rocks of it all, the shush and crash of Atlantic flow, the sog and bog and drench and feist of wild weather, you buy boots that will allow you in and over and through. You do, trust me. Not many folk will tolerate so much rain, such trixy winds, gales even, that rise just when you reckon peace will reign for another day, and we, who do, have watched them barrel in, tearing down trees, flattening grasses and relocating washing left on a line. And just as suddenly, they move on. I wonder, these days, where they might go. The perfect weather is a gift I would buy, but that gift is just a gift and not a given. There are weeks of rain and no rain for the odd day, pretty much.

Here, there is a load of dark and that has a lot to do with the rain. If I look at the weather for the next 4 weeks, it says Rain, Rain, Rain, all day long. Of course it never is. If you have a fox intuition, you just watch the clouds and grab your moment for a scoot oot, as I do. Funny that……I notice and hear from those I notice, that they don’t get how spontaneous they need to be up here. Some visitors leave. I watch them go, all angry and with faces set in judgement as if we islanders deliberately brought in the rain in a witchy sort of way, the sideways in-your-face blattering soak that challenges their choice of walking boot and melts their mascara as they wheech a puddle into a tsunami. Do they think I/we have control? We don’t, I assure you. It thinks me. Sunshine all of the time, I tell myself, would just be so ordinary and island life is anything but. Folk who live here and last here become as flexible as dancers in both mind and body. We learn, living in the wettest place on earth, to make something out of everything, even to smile at the rain. We call ourselves pluviophiles and proudly. We laugh at the days to come and let our words be snatched away in the gales. We light candles in the dark and say we are lucky, so lucky, to be living in a beautiful and safe place. Privately we roll our eyes at the whole thing, sigh and cuss but that is only done, as I said, privately.

Dynamic living is not something that comes naturally for us all. It is more of an inner choice, a decision to celebrate whatever life sends our way and in the very place we make our home. Sadness comes, of course it does, but that is the same for every single human soul, the wishing for something different is universal, no matter the weather, location, a person’s material wealth or lack of it. I learn these things daily, remind myself to be thankful for whatever I have and to ignore the doubts and fears, all imagined anyway. The most wonderful people I have ever met are those who have endured and survived situations, people and events that I cannot even imagine surviving and it is all due to a strong spirit, that invisible power that refuses to give up or give in. I aspire to such strength as my life has been tame by comparison. That doesn’t negate the impact of inner darkness, inner rain or an inner punching gale inside my own head and heart, but it does help to know that ‘this, too, shall pass’ as it always does and the key is perception. How I see something, anything, decides my response to it.

I walk among the sodden trees, the crushed coppery bracken, negotiating the fat puddles, the lift and squelch of rain soaked mud and I know, again, that I am free to just let life be, the dark, the rain, the wind and then that sudden bright day, the sky open, the burns gurgling in spate as sunshine sparkles the bubbles. Clean, clear mountain water rushing down, carving yet deeper into the rocks releasing stories long buried. I hear them flutter around me like birds, lifting into the sky, higher and higher until they turn back into rain, falling once more so that we who still live will not forget how life goes on, and on and on. We are here but fleetingly. Let us leave our own story behind when we go, the story of a life lived to the full no matter the weather, the darkness, the burning sunshine, the rain, because there will be a future someone who will need to hear it, someone who needs our light for their dark. How do I live with what I live with? There’s a story there, just waiting to be told.

by

Island Blog – Monday, Monday

Mondays have always been the one day when I really felt like dressing up and going out. It seemed that the weekend fell about my ears most welcomely, bringing a drive of its own; the sleep ins, the pyjama days, the allowances. Then, well refreshed by all of that, Monday arrived like a stand-up soldier, bristling. I wanted to punch it in the face. No, I said, you don’t do this to me. You don’t ‘tell’ me I can’t want this or feel that just because, in your arrogance, you reckon you are Day One of a new week. All those groany rules. All those restrictions like you think its ok to pull in my stays and what…..I eat gruel or something in deference to your pedigoguery? This is World Women’s Day btw, so I am not playing, not that I ever did.

This Monday, as has oftentimes befallen me afore, I have a deep yearning to go out, to share a wonderful vibrant, candlelit evening with friends. I realise this will not be, as I spin fresh coriander, garlic, tomato and condiments into a bowl to mix with my pasta. Pasta again. Actually I don’t mind pasta again but on this Monday I absolutely do and a half. I remind myself there is a pandemic. Check. I remind myself that my dinner date is dead. Check. I remind myself that all restaurants on the island, along with the beautician and the hairdresser are shut on a Monday. Well, pants to that. I attempt to scoot my Monday longings into Tuesday but Tuesday is a very different creature. Tuesday is gentle and not combative. Tuesday is happy being where she is, after Monday. I would be happy too, if I was Tuesday and after Monday. Monday is a menace and she has way too big a sense of herself. She is almost male.

So, I fanny about with mending jeans, sewing things, watching birds, walking in the rain and making that coriander thing for my pasta. I also clear even more of my dead husband’s stuff and the binman waves at me and mouths something I don’t hear, but his smile is delicious and it almost saves the Monday thing. I check my geranium seedlings, haul in wood, mutter about the freckles on the butt of my car # toonearthepothole, respond to some lawyer emails, send a text, make tsaziki. I love tsaziki and it is an art form. Too sloppy a grated cucumber and it becomes mush. This one worked just fine and I flagged down my daughter-in-law on her return from school collection to give her some.

But I still have that yearning to dress up and go out. Of course ‘out’ is off limits and has been for considerable yonks, but it doesn’t stop the feeling, the yearning. It thinks me. I wonder, when this is all behind us, will we go wild? Will we have cowered in our darkened dens for long enough to have lost skin tone, pliancy and the connection with our wild spirits? Or will we, instead be much quicker at being ready for the excitement of an evening out with friends, even if it is a Monday?

by

Island Blog – Fun

So, yesterday was all about love and cards and flowers and romantic dates. For some. Me……..? Well, I busied myself with the craft of housekeeping and caring right up to the evening, my favourite time of day (or is it night?) when the northern hemisphere teeters on the cusp of transition. It’s time for a shower, to put the tatties on to boil, to gee up the woodburner and to check the garage door is shut against Dennis. He could flip that old thing into matchsticks, taking out several solid things in passing, the way he is growling behind the sky.

On this cusp, after delivering a meal to himself as he sits encased in his pyjamas, his ears clamped shut inside the headphones, some TV series playing out on his screen, silent mouths moving in a dialogue to which I am not privy, I return to the kitchen, light myself a candle or two and pour a glass of wine. Happy Valentine’s I told myself and myself smiled. I love myself enough not to bother about such lovey dovey nonsense. I could clean the faces of the kitchen units; I could have another shower; I could sweep up the crumbs or I could go to the pub. Which is what I did. The kitchen unit cleaning thing almost got me. I had tunes playing and candles flickering shadows up the walls and it all looked rather pretty until I put on my specs and noticed that there was more to cleaning the units than I had thought heretofore. Some reddish blobs had the chutzpa to stick themselves right across one door and there was much dust along the horizontals. Blow that. This is not evening work. It was a quick shift into a jacket and boots and off I toddled, giving Growling Dennis a quick and filthy look en route.

It was fun. Fun is what I love best and the one thing that isn’t always available here unless I fun the flames of it all by myself. I’m pretty good at it, though I say so myself. By the time I left, I had hugged old mates, commiserated, reassured, discussed the excitement of historical geology and understood better the palaver involved in building a new house on an island already drunk on rain. Conversation and communication in a life that has lost so very much of both are as welcome as 12 red roses any day.

When I was a recalcitrant and bloody-minded teenager I sent myself valentine cards. It saved anyone else the bother, after all, and guaranteed that I wasn’t the sad girl without a boyfriend, horribly visible in the school playground, awash with shame and certain that she has terrible breath. Nowadays I believe boyfriends are highly overrated. It all starts out rosy but mostly that’s where it begins to stop. I heard of someone who was incandescent about not getting a card from her husband. I held in a smile because if that is how he feels about her then its better out in the open. Others keep the flame burning, I know that. I met a couple of them last night, still dancing and planning to dance right up to the end of love.

And I smiled at that too.

by

Island Blog 151 Winter and Spring

2014-01-27 14.08.00

“Winter is not a season, it’s an occupation.”   Sinclair Lewis

Now, as the cold sets in and the winds bite, we can turn towards home.  The lack of strong daylight draws us to the soft lighting, the fire glow, candles and a good torch for the Last Dog Walk at bedtime.  I find I read even more, if that is, indeed, possible.  My tastebuds changed their tune and thick soup replaces a rocket salad.  I remember Elisabeth Luard, the famous cookery writer saying to me, once, that she loved the winter.  All those bonkers unmatching hats and gloves, the fat woolly jumpers, thick socks, big boots and nobody watching her waistline, least of all, her. It was almost with a sigh she welcomed Spring, knowing full well that those pretty frocks might well resist joining at the zip.

Gone are those foraging walks, the fresh tang of autumn with skies full of redwings and the leaves turning into gold and red to finally fall to the ground, a crunchy carpet at first, then a soggy mulch beneath our boots.  Mud gathers below the verges, frost splits the tarmac and the potholes re-appear with a vengeance.  But, walking into winter can hold its own delights, after all, who doesn’t like jumping in puddles?  If you have gone beyond puddle jumping there is something wrong with you because it may be the best form of excercise you can take and there is never any harm in re-visiting the inner child.  So many of us lose our sense of play and it is a Zeus of a mistake. The finest people I know still play childish pranks at 80 with twinkly winkly eyes and a dare in them for you to even think of disapproving.

In Sweden, so I am told by my viking daughter-in-law, there is no rain/sleet or slush.  There is only snow.  Kissing the ground at first, this white out can grow to terrifying depths, disappearing whole houses overnight.  If it ever happens here, there is considerable panic as if we are all about to turn into snowmen.  Trains stop, buses stop, and nobody can get to work.  Well, I struggle to find the bad in that, unless, of course, you are an emergency service.  In Sweden this is all carefully thought through and those who need to get about grow wings. Although I don’t want to say this, I do wonder at the flapdoodle this country gets into about seasonal changes, and I do shake my head.  At Tapselteerie, if the track was impassable, we just didn’t pass it.  Sudden holidays, lack of food, the power off, no phone, all meant fun.  As long as the stock were fed, milked and checked, we were all quite happy to play.  I remember once being at the hairdresser in town and the local police (pronounced poh-liss) popping his head round the door of each shop to recommend that those of us who lived ‘over by’ meaning anywhere but the town, should head home as the hill road was fast being wiped out.  Being wiped out is exactly what happens.  The terrain is just one hilly blanket and there is no way to tell where the road lies within it.  I said to the poh-liss that I wisnae going hame with one side cropped and the other trailing over my right ear, and, by the time I did head overby, someone had already found the road and marked it out which was very thoughtful even if it did take two attempts to top the highest hilly bend with a neat short back and sides.

It seems to me that fear is the killer here.  What on earth is there to be afraid of?  It’s only snow and puddles after all, although not both together.  Ice is a bit different though with its chameleon ability to become the road.  When someone ahead of me scooted neatly off the single track road in the un-gritted glen, landing just under the nose of a startled horse munching hay, all of us stopped to help.  We hefted and bumped and, on finding all that hefting and bumping quite pointless, popped the inhabitants into our own cars and trundled them home, waving to the horse as we drew away.

And, of course, there is always the promise of Spring.  Crocuses are coming, snowdrops pushing into the cold light, birds looking for nest sites.  But we should honour winter.  There is a beauty in it, a bare stark beauty that should not be missed, like building snowmen, puddle jumping, making soup, wearing bonkers and unmatching hats and gloves.  Longing for something to end just lengthens it I find.  Our winters are unpredictable, unlike Sweden.

How versatile are you?  I personally want to be able to bounce like Tigger (or move like Jagger) whatever comes my way, even if it does require forward planning and something to hold on to. And, there is always a temporarily unbouncing somebody who needs my help.