dolphins

Sunshine and warmth spins me. I love it, long for it, especially this season, but when it comes, lifting light and freedomwild, I can suddenly feel like I’m on a swivel stick, confused emotions dinging around as if all my road signs have turned on me. I can’t explain it better. I just know there is a yearning on such days. Opportunity is out there, loud and lustrous, but my feet are fettered. I will walk, and I do, but the walk is singular, when once it was something I wanted, but rarely achieved. I tweak and dead-head and weed and clear, but it doesn’t bring me the Good Job response I seek. As the sun, warm and wonderful, captures the sky, moving from blinding light to a red resolve, I watch it. It’s as if sunshine needs sharing. Look at the way those yellow flowers rise, butter bright, see the way gulls white up, rising above the incoming tide! See those roses, their response to the sun, the tips of my too-long grass quivering in excitement. See this, see that? I want to say all this, but it’s just me here.

What shall we do tonight, he used to say on these rare sunshine days. Let’s go out for dinner, and we did, booking late, dressing up, a sunshine excitement running like fire through our bodies and minds. And we laughed as the sun visors came down, as the sunlight sparkled off flutes of fizz, anticipation electrifying. It never mattered that tomorrow a summer storm was forecast, nor that he would be out in it, searching for whales, dolphins, porpoise, safe landings. This sunshine day was all that mattered. But that was then, and it thinks me.

When we have had happy times, great experiences, we don’t forget. We will, eventually, accept their place in our past, but when a. trigger triggers, it all comes overwhelmingly back and we need to employ juxtaposition. I had this and now I don’t. I had this in spades and now I don’t. To accept this is like volunteering for extra latin classes, but it needs to be done if a person wants to move on richly, and I do. However many times sunshine days confound and upend me, I know that I did have what I had. I still don’t know how to accept the loss, perhaps because sunshine days are as rare as Kyawthuite up here in the chilly wet Western Stick Out islands. I allow myself that. If triggers comes daily, they are more sortable. The random ones less so. But I will work on this. Everyone feels loss, everyone, and, hopefully, most of the everyones out there will notice, react, consider and make changes for personal support the next time the trigger triggers.

The Pierris reds up wild. The sea-loch skin is beautifully scarred by geese families, en traverse. The ancient pines dangle red oxide cones, backlit as the sun catches them in its downward bright. Shadows lengthen, change, shift. The sun-followers begin to close their petals, and I have linguine to cook as I remember those sunshine days, the ones where I was an active and dynamic part, and I am so very thankful.

Never let it be said that journeying is for the young. I never journeyed so much in my life as I am these days and all because I wrote down my life and Two Roads Published it. It is not just the trip tomorrow down to Glasgow for an interview with Jane Garvey in the BBC Studios – Woman’s Hour ‘Celebrating Extraordinary Women’ (oo-er) May 27^th 10 am; it’s not just the trip the following week for an interview with Sally Magnusson, a sort of Desert Island Discs for Radio Scotland on June 2^nd, called Sunday Morning; it’s the journey my mind is taking, and my body, both of which, to be honest, have obviously been resting for quite some time.

The trouble with growing older is that we ‘allow’ ourselves to step out of the slipstream. And everyone around us allows it too. When something or someone requires us to step back in, we begin, at first, to spin, understandably, having not had so much exercise for years. We resist and fall back onto the verge, wheezing and flapping our hands in the air, laugh, if we have the breath and say something like…….oh I’ll just wait here for you and admire the view…….!

Not an option for me.

So how does a woman, like me, part way between young and old (not saying which part) find her way back into the slipstream, the rush and tumble of life, a life where people and things become faint memories overnight?

Colour. Attitude. Confidence. Letting go.

I remember learning once this wisdom. ‘Fake it till you make it.’ and I instantly liked that way of turning life on its head. I realised that just because I might feel frightened, or unsure or too young or too old and wheezy, I could, if I so chose, act a part. Now, you will know, if you have read my book, Island Wife, that acting a part was something I did often as each challenge rose up before me, like a Rachel Whiteread sculpture, blocking all exits. It requires not my own strength, not my own experience, even, but simply a willingness to let go, and to find quiet moments in which to sharpen my sword/teeth/wits as preparation for whatever comes next.

I couldn’t cook until hungry guests arrived expecting dinner. I had no maternal instincts until I gave birth. I knew not the rules of engagement, nor of wifedom until they took over my life and woke me each morning with a to-do list. I had no idea when I wrote down my life that so many others would want to tell me how my story sang out to their own, thus creating a new harmony, one that cannot be contained or filed away, for it has taken wings and will make a new journey, all of its own into new skies and over uncharted lands.

Maybe, just by refusing to wheeze and flap and admire the view, I have become the pioneer I always secretly hoped I might be.

And dolphins often play in a slipstream.