defy

Having no idea who reads my blogs, nor who benefits. Never knowing what each new day will bring, a serendipity or a catastrophe, a gain or a loss, a fall or that moment when I will stand tall as a warrior. It’s as if life lives me, and, in a strange way, I like that, most of the time. I like danger, living on the edge, always ready to do my very best at outwitting. I am naturally spontaneous, a state which can, and often has, found me in a dodgy situation, mudswamp rising up my legs, the dark completing me, eradication. Until, that is, my eyes adjusted. They did, and they do, and once the ‘ayes’ have it, the house is quietened, and then comes sensibility. Love that word. ‘The quality of being able to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences; sensitivity.’

There I am, was, appreciating and responding to my highest level, and although this life is bloody exhausting most of the time, what with all this learning even when I left school decades ago, I still love life, the way it lives me, the way I live it. Well, not so much the latter to be honest, because I can still flounder in mudswamp and the dark. However the importance of the important is simple. It’s poopy in the mud. I can do dark but not for long. I love light, am light, bring light. And there’s something in that, the need and the strength to defy. Any something is an enough something because we know the opposite of that.

I have no idea where my children are. I have no idea what will become of me, ditto when the next gale will smash down most of our island trees, nor whom will fall sick, nor when this baby will be born, nor when I will see this person rising from the sadness with a smile on her face. I know not whether this shrub or that will survive the winter, nor when I might hear the Arctic swans softly talking from across the sea-loch. I don’t know when a still day with all its quiet glory will come, not after a torrential rainday, the sea all a-popple with white smoke and sprachle. I never know and there’s something about that.

On June 1st Jenny died.

We have been friends for over 4o years, the same as my years of marriage.

Our children knew each other as little ones and those children now have little ones of their own. We had a bet going, she and I that her daughter-in-law would give birth before my own did. The due dates hold hands, they’re so close. I will see my new grandchild, but she won’t see hers.

Over the years, our roads travelled in different directions, but we kept in touch. When she first got breast cancer, she was completely herself about the whole thing. No time for this, she said, need to sort out treatment and keep moving. She went sailing after that, for 7 months, she and her man, in a yacht to beat all other yachts with big-ass sails and comfort below deck, every comfort, and the wind in her hair and salt on her tongue, whilst I became an Island Wife. But women who connect at a wild and deep level, who recognise each other’s spirit and love it, never lose touch, even if the contact is once a year.

We sailed with them once, meeting them on a Greek island. We all wondered how it would work, four of us converging where Two Roads meet, after 30 years apart, and living in close quarters for a couple of weeks.

I could have been a big pain in the ass, I said.

You are. She replied and handed me a beer.

In the evenings, moored in a little warm harbour, we would cook, eat and make music. They taught me songs, and I them, and there was something magical about the candlelight, the warm nights, the laughter and song.

She did much with her life and was never still. She was the second woman ever to command a Royal Navy warship. A transatlantic skipper, a magistrate, a wife, mother grandmother, although that title sounds way too old for her. She adored her family, and actively showed it. She was feisty, impossible, decisive and noisy and there is a big hole left now she is gone.

But what will stay with me for ever, and this may sound selfish, is what she gave to me. She never faltered and when I did, she whooped my butt. I’m not saying, or even imagining, that she had life sussed, because I know she didn’t think that at all. I saw, at times, such sadness in her big eyes, and she might tell me, briefly, or she might not. When she knew she had only time left, she would still pick up if I called, or answer a text with humour. She came to my book launch down south in a bright pink wig after aggressive chemo. It was our last hug.

I salute her. She is a woman who challenged me to be the best I could be, just as she challenged herself.

Sail on Silver Girl.