fiction

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Island Blog – Long Shadows and a Someone

Here is something I really don’t understand, even as I sort of get it. First part of that sentence, good grammar, the latter ‘now speke’. Just saying. Although I have lived all the way from grammatical stripulation, something which drove me right up into mini-skirts and the climbing out of windows after 10pm to hook up with a market stall owner and an E Type soft top, to the now of ‘like’ being the first word before pretty much every single word. It used to be ‘Um’ and that meant a knuckle rap, even in my day. In a moment, She said (all of 4 feet tall behind her desk) of hesitation, hold the silence, use your eyes, lift your chin, make it seem as if you are about to come up with something utterly profound. Your brain will catch up. She was right btw. And I thank her. She cast a very short shadow, but I remember her longer.

I walked today, this afternoon, and noticed that the grasses interrupted the track. It stopped me. I hadn’t noticed shadow before. The light is shifting, the balance too. The dying fronds luffed and danced in shadow talk. I could see it across my boots as a soft swish of goodbye for now. Onwards and into the woods, I see anew the arse end of a fallen pine, the roots highwide and skyward, a curve shadow which was t’other side before the Autumn arrived, which seems very sudden. After that I did a load of noticing, shadows longer, strange, almost confusing. Maybe shadows always are and maybe that whole confusulation is what notices us as we notice. Now there’s a happy thing. There is a theory that we miss places and times, but what if they miss us? I have places in my mind, pebbles in the wilderness of my story, which halted me. Still do when I remember them. I smell decay, the erupticus of the land taking back. The leaves turning, almost happily into red, gold, brown and falling. It is as if the earth rises up in welcome hands.

Perhaps it is something to do with the colding, the change into the dark and away from the endless summer light, when the shadows finally get their say, longing. And they do ‘long’. They are longer than the one who actually walks the earth. We are finite, minute, temporary and yet we are extraordinary, magical, pivotal, powerful, and we make a point, a mark and each of us is a Someone.

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Island Blog – The Disappearing Road

I like pathways or skinny roads which disappear beyond my vision because they invite me on. I like conversations which tail off in the face of interruption. I like the look on someone’s face when there is no chance of finding out more. I like chance encounters at a coffee kiosk, on a walk, in a shop doorway, in a luggage collision in an airport, when faces tell me so much and voices tell me little, if anything. I remember, as a child, hearing words from older mouths and looking up into faces to see something which made me suddenly unsure. I had no language to explain it, even to myself and, chances are I just skipped on as little girls do, but now it thinks me. What I saw when I did look up were the scars of life, the lines of worry and the brilliance of learned concealment. I have them on my own old face but instead of giving me issue or a rush towards an appointment with a cosmetic surgeon, I love them because they invite me on. To look further. Where will I go now? Where do I lead myself? What does that twisty spindrift of a barely drivable road lead next? I am still curious like Alice.

I like the seasons, the way they take for fricken ever to arrive as if not one of them has ever learned to be assertive. We, down here, winkle our landlife through indecision for weeks, cardy on, cardy off, thermals needed one day, becoming a fitted boiler without thermostat the next. Windows open until they slam shut in the fist of a gale. A clear blue inviting a gentle walk until, not quite half-way through, the sky closes in a grey whooha and a million clouds dump their load as if they had held on far too long.

I like the way the islanders respond to all of these things. I met the same acceptance in the 70’s among the wonderful men and women who worked at Church Farm in Martham. I had never, till then, met truth from mouths which connected with the expression on a face. I remember a light in my heart then. Here are people I understand, even though I was the farmer’s wife and they were workers, it didn’t matter. I could see where that disappearing road lead. Here, in my island life, there is a shrug, a nonchalance, an acceptance in pretty much everything and yet with a curiosity, a mischievous challenge, a ‘let’s go’ thing.

When we are born into a family, there are plans made for us before we can piss straight. This is normal and everyone does this, including me and himself, even though every single baby proved enough for a dissertation. As new parents always believe they hold the reins, and they do, for a short while, even as a new and often uncomfortably independent spirit is born with every child. This can prove awkward, even embarrassing. Oh, we all know of teenage angst, of hormonal turbulence and think, as we laugh through it all around a table with parents going through the same thing, that it will pass, the whatever of the whatever of it. It may not.

I, for one, found my way. I say nothing against my parents, my loving safety, their patient opportunities for furtherance. I was loved. But I always longed for escape, to follow the disappearing road. I didn’t know why. Perhaps it was the million miles between words and truth, perhaps the carefully defined road connections, the marked out parking spots, the rules of controlled living. I live no longer under any controls although I find my own both severe and opportunistic as if I have to choose. Ok, I will. I accept the severe, the self-judgement, the list of my crimes and failures.

I still love that sleek and slim disappearing road.

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Island Blog – The Will Be of the Might Be

It rained all day. I woke to the lash of it, the slam against my bedroom window, the leaks. I paddled downstairs, almost enjoying the wet beneath my feet. It felt thrilling. The wind was up, no idea of its identity as I never did. I needed my husband to understand such frillary and he is very gone. Just wind, then, slamming rain like an old woman with no teeth and a mouthful of spit and way too much freeway. She woke me, a lot. I slept once I recognised her and refused to engage. She’ll lose breath soon enough. Always does. However, this rain, this old woman/ spit thing does seem to bring Ground Control into a standstill. There must be something about the way she moves which brings in a certain turbulence. I confess that a part of me is wondering at my words because every single year this particular windolence moves in and does just what we are experiencing right now, we at ‘Ground Control’, it seems, are astonished all over again. It thinks me.

Delusional thinking appears to be well ingrained. I can see the need for a link to Ground Control, the voice of definicity, the assuredness that, even now, we can shape our world. And that thinks me again. Why not, indeed? I have in my time washed the diorama off the jeans and tees and sweatshirts belonging to the uprising of my babies as they touched 6 foot and beyond. Were they not about to reshape at least a part of the world? And, in my own time, did I reshape too?

My text said, confidently, that my delivery of whatever will be delivered today. It has rained all day long. The roads are or could be flooded, the posties drenched. Add to that the ferry, the big one, which didn’t run today because of something or other. Endless hiccups, endless problems and endless angst. Island Life. It is smurry out there, can’t see the hills, only rain. It’s beautiful, though, like a painting.

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Island Blog – Tearaway

We start with a plan. I did as a young mum with a tumble of kids. In my plan, in our plan, we were excellent parents, mother, father, we were. We weren’t. In the melee ensuing of business development, of invasive strangers, of things collapsing, falling in, stopping, as in water flow, of freezing pipes, of bat invasions, mice, cold, we did falter, our dream did sink somewhat. It felt boggish. But we were not going to go there because, even though we dreamed and thought deeply, we were above ground people. If you are a person of the land, the field, the marsh, the emptinessof soil and space, who know the fear of drought, of flood, of loss and gain, the singularity of joy, the sharing of it, then you will recognise something. Possibly more than something, because everyone knows what it feels like to sink, what it feels like to choose ‘above ground.’

I employ the above ground as an adjunct. Today was remarkable at the Best Cafe Ever. No, it was overwhelming. There must have been hundreds of customers, in line and for 5 hours. I did feel like sinking. I didn’t check with the others in the Servery because to be honest, we barely met beyond a pull back or let go in a narrow space as we served and cleared and tried to make the soup last. I did turn into the Washeroo thinking, I can’t do this. That lasted not even 5 seconds. I have great inner talk. Don’t be ridonculous, ya eejit, rise, RISE. It works.

I like to tearaway from, well most things if I’m honest, but on this one, from inner giving up. Too many do this, too many times I have been tempted. and then the Tearaway comes in, like thunder, like a smile from Joe the new postie, from a word of recognition, a smile from eyes really connecting with my own, and a tune with lyrics which stop me, the tune that takes me to my piano, makes me pay attention.

Tearaway. From old confines, from old controls, from old myths and mistakes. Tearaway.

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Island Blog – Just Flying On

I did my own housework today. It’s so damn boring, my own housework, whereas I am like a woman on fire when it comes to someone else’s. I am can-do, let’s do this, even if the job appears magnifluent with horribleness. What is that all about? I ask myself this as I lug stuff for washing to the washing thing. No answer comes beyond the flip dash of swallows madly encouraging their second brood to fly, ffs. I feel for them, not that I ever knew resistance from my kids, as they almost went without a lookback. I pulled myself back to myself, as they say in SA, and grabbed a hoover, then a bucket and mop and sorted things that needed sorting. I like my home to be clean even if nobody ever sees most of it. This is about me and how I care about me, my personal standards.

Bring that back, roll it right back to the core. I have standards, yes, but just for myself. I feel no judgement when I meet others who don’t share what I choose to be my level pegs. It doesn’t annoy me. I cock my head at this. Really? Well, yes, probably, but I contain it. I have five grown children with five grown partners. I have met walls and fences. I have learned. What haveI learned? Acceptance, obviously. Was that easy? No. So How did it become the normal in those relationships? Did you remember yourself in these new dynamics? Not always, no, although once I got to know the partners, I found myself loving them and that was me being me. How did you do that? Asking questions without agenda, just interested in their life, their own thoughts, the she or he of she or he. And, I interrupt my questioner, of continuing that through the years. Instead of the easy homey conversations with primal children, elevation is required, I have found. To show interest and to ask about the partner of my beloved, the one, let’s be honest, who took that beloved out of the maternal/paternal sphere and into a new ellipsis.

I made chappit tatties just now. It’s a Scottish thing you might need to google. I also made a salad and all of the before was delivered on Friday, fresh island produce. I can smell the island on the lettuce, salty, safe, wholesome. I love the ground of this life, the wild, the silence and darkness at night, the safety, the community, the song and strength of it, the way we move to help each other, the way we can step in or fly out when it’s an urgence. The way we understand that the earth breathes, the sea breathes, the world is changing. We don’t know what to do next beyond the fact that we don’t have a clue.

In the now of now, we are flying on.

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Island Blog – The Before of Us

I have a big pile of books on my kitchen table. If I wasn’t at work on a Tuesday, I would gather them up for a swap, but I am working and so the level rises in tales of other lands, other times, of those whose lives I have never lived, of whose pain I can only catch in sentences. Most stories talk to me in a voice from the past, of challenges and overcomings, of loss and mostly, of moving through and onwards. They all inspire me because of just one single thread, the one that securely connects most of us, all of us, to the before of us, to the insertion of a generational electoid in a daily script. I know this. I picked it up with my own children, spilling out rulings that often confounded me, as if I had no control of the spilling. As soon as the electoid had deflated, I regretted. This is how we learn. We make mistakes because we just do. Without our acceptance, or acknowledgement, we spin the same tale and, in a place of authority, we deliver it. I did. Do I regret? Oh yes. But the damage was done and flifflewaffle is redundant here. The before of us is what every generation must learn from. This one in this generation and in my experience is a lot about chasing money, no, fighting for it and against everyone; It’s about mothers at school gates looking beautiful, sharing tips on well-being spas, nail decorators, hair stylists, the answer to all internal dilemmas costing a gazillion an hour. It’s about looking beautiful. Looking. Beautiful.

Looks fade. Just saying. My book pile is fingered and bented. Some pages are blobbed, twisted, stuck together. This is life. The sun is out now after twinglerain, sharp shards of it, the sun diddling about up there between cloudal shenanigans. It’s cold, it’s hot, it’s windy, it’s a party game t’ween the weatherness and our attitude. We must adapt, move on with new tunes, new attitude, new intelligence. As we must beyond the before of us.

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Island Blog – Emerging and Engagement

We are in a seasonal change. The mornings are cool, the light less light, less strong, the mornings darker. I love such changes, all of them because it involves me and my attitude. It also reminds me of my mother’s big ottoman on the landing, wherein she would carefully fold all summer clothes, bringing out the scratchy woolen jumpers, the thicker trousers, the warmer underpinnings. Not sure we can do that anymore, even if we do own a landing big enough for an ottoman. Nonetheless, the temperature does lower as Summer gathers up her swishy skirts and dances off to Africa. Seasons don’t stop being themselves. They just move on to do their thing on the other side of the world. I love that too and it thinks me.

I hear, oh god we all hear, the moans at the loss of Summer as if nothing will ever be right ever again, as if cool mornings heralds the end of everything. Such nonsense. We have all lived some years knowing that nothing at all lasts, that everything changes and never stops doing that change thing. I suspect that too much talk of ‘loss’ can, and probably does infect a community, a workspace, a family situation, There is nothing like a single voice of misery to bring down the most dynamic team. But this subject is on no more than a change in seasonal flow. I do understand a sense of loss, nonetheless. Those heady days of frocks and bare arms, of walking for hours beneath glorious sunshine, of taking warmth for granted, leaving doors open and not shouting about it; of dry dogs after long walks, of mud solidified enough to be just dust on boots; of standing for a conversation, of sitting on a balcony with a glass of chilled something-or-other and of trusting all of the above. I get it.

The thing I have learned is that attitude makes any change shift into opportunity. As those of us who are getting old get older, it is our essential choice. As joints stiffen and shout, as it gets harder to gauge the level of bumpy land, as the cold sneaks in knife-like, as self-doubts grow mighty and decisions flounder, we cannot help but remember how vibrantly we once swashbuckled through our complex lives. A seasonal loss? Yes, definitely yes. A different seasonal change, one of a life long lived. When we began it was Winter. Then we met someone and Spring began to flower up, cautious, yes, but little blooms pushed through the cold. Then came Summer, the crazy warm long hours of sunshine, the swing of it, the fragrance of hope filling the air, the dance of it, the wild long hours of daylight, of hope, of dreams. Then Autumn, golden, still warm, the light like a chiaroscuro, elevating what was already there, sharpening its edges, pulling the distant closer, reflections brighter, calls stronger out there in the otherness. Then Winter again, but a different one from before, before the commitment to the one, to children, to family, to decades of hard work and laughter and sharing and agony and loss and gain and goodbyes and hellos.

I like the word Emerging, not that I thought for one minute I would be still doing it, not at this age, but I am and my attitude is absolutely IT on this. I don’t like being alone. I don’t like being old. I don’t know anyone who does. Ok, so that’s the bottom line. Let’s think up. I do. I wake every morning and say thankyou to my bed. I won’t say I plan my day because, unless I have work in the Best Cafe Ever, I don’t. I just wake up and that’s damn good. I wash, dress, make-up my face, eat breakfast, clean up, look out. And whatever is going on out there, I choose to go with it, up the warmth if required, call for help if I need a big gas cylinder attached, download an audio book, hoover (boring), wave to walkers, plan supper, make hummus or something like that. I have the urge to emerge.

I can’t change the loss of me, but I can rise above everything if I choose to engage with change.

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Island Blog – A Lemony Sun and a Wiggling

I look at it, the lemony sharp of it within a cushion of grey/white flat, sky closed. It almost blinds me. I see the spread of it but it has no strong voice, no instrumental reach or so I decide. Way below, the flowers remaining wiggle a bit in the breeze like unsure dancers. Reminds me of a bad DJ and a faltering wiggly floor, half lit, mostly empty. The ‘dynamic’ left earlier and moved on. However it was a work day today and there was plenty of wiggling as we served and catered for and laughed together and criticised each others’ choice of tunes for the Best Cafe Ever. It made no difference, the sky-talk out there high above us as we sorted and accommodated the world below and that thinks me.

I hear moans about the summer. Too hot in Englandshire, yes, I get that. Not enough sun in Scotland, no, I don’t get that. To live in Scotland is to choose a new map, particularly on the West Coast. We stick out, just saying, way into Neverland and take the consequences, or we don’t choose to live here. I moved my pelargoniums just today, into the flash of the lemony sun, for about 30 minutes, because they said, the pelargoniums, that they will not flower without more sun. Well, I tell them. I did. What’s wrong with your attitude?

Attitude. So important. I read, today, a beautiful acknowledgement in our local monthly paper, of a dear friend gone. I think about her inspiraship. She was a community nurse, she was mother of four, she was a wife and homemaker, she was a friend. Her influence was never lemony. It was more a golden glow. I remember her with little kids, like my own, meeting by chance in the then Coylumbridge Hotel, on Autumn half term and joining her, laughing over drinks and stories. A fixed memory for me. Her smile, her love, her natural beauty. I had no idea, and nor did she, of what was to come.

Time passed, life demanded, it is at it is. We both saw lemony suns and found it harder to wiggle but know this. In the eyebright of anyone stays the story, held and stored and recognised, no matter the falter, no matter the doubts, the forgets. The gone of someone is never the end because lemony or not, the sun shines on that life, long lived, long-loved. I will always remember her and I was far away as a star. But I saw her shine and wiggle.

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Island Blog – Liminal Dilemma

We all have them, the dither on the cusp of a new thing. Summer and Autumn obviously feel the same. Autumn comes in with a bag of chillswag in the morning, clouding windows, cold to the touch and bringing shivers into the house, the snatch and pull of a warm cardigan around a human body. I can hear her chuckle as I do this very thing. And, as the day moves on, the temperature rises until I am here at almost 5pm barely frocked and with the sun almost burning. It thinks me.

I have dithered many, oh many times, on that cusp. Trusting that whatever I did or didn’t do would breach the void, move some situation on. I have stood there, often, skidding on the rocks of slippery, hesitant, wondering, doubting and very much alone. But there is something about being there in the first place. What brought me here? a question requiring an answer and, from what was around me at the time, nobody else was in answering mode. Is that what it comes to……..nobody but me to step across the void, to acknowledge there is no-one there at all? Perhaps. It’s lonely though.

On the obverse side of this I can see that it isn’t just me who make decisive choices plus impact and, possibly, initiating chaos. Even as a young mother, I did face all of that. I was the one who found myself, discovered myself, on the slippery rocks, and who stepped on. Looking back to my then situation, there was nobody else who would have even got there, nor wanted to, the whole maintenance of equilibrium, the status quo, being an absolute. For so many years I doubted myself, this crazy skidder on rocks, the one who yelled Enough! and worked on the change. Maybe it’s a generation thing. My peers conformed after all. I was born different. All through school I disagreed, and was silenced or expelled. Now I live with that self and can see her as before her time, the rebel, the one who actually did make a difference in so many ways, in business decisions, in the lives of my children, in the community, in my own life.

So, I recognise Autumn, the proud mother that she is, and welcome her. I also feel a great affection for Summer as she, unwillingly diminishes. I have loved her light and her warmth, but she needs her rest now. However, the combination sisterhood of these two proud seasons does bring the most glorious of surprise light. I think I love the cusp, the liminal dilemma.

Perhaps I see myself in this.

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Island Blog – A Jigsaw Tangle Jester

I get home to a home bathed in light and sunshine. It was damn hot in the servery today and many degrees higher in the kitchen, what with all the ovens and toast machines and grills pumping hot breath into the skinny place. When folk come to the counter, I notice that all they want is recognition. No, not all they want, obviously, because they are here to order two kiddies meals, one toastie with beet, feta and walnut, one just cheese and maybe seaweed chutney, two soups, one with a cheese scone, yes, warmed please, another with something else. I find the ordering a wonderful stray into a new jigsaw piece, mainly because I have not paid due attention to what is on offer that day, this day. One customer confounded me. He wasn’t initially friendly, just ordered but, I noticed as we attempted to work together, him on the far side and me, glasses steamed up and suddenly just out of the Washeroo because everyone else had just gone somewhere, that he wasn’t that certain of himself. I believe that, on the far side there is one part of the puzzle of this whole running a cafe thing, one that can be drawn into place. Together with smiles and explanations, he ordered. I noticed that, after sometime, he and his wife remained seated, talking amicably. I set the jigsaw piece in place.

When I set off for work in the morning, I have no set picture, because I know a lot about business, over decades, and there is only tangle. There is also the Jester, the one which dances in just to confound. You think, we thinked, that, because of the weather, the time of year, the day itself, we would expect this. Well, ‘this’ never turned up. Never. Running a business may be a dream, as it was for us, but it is tough and unpredictable, diminishing and very personal and it takes many years to establish. I think, I remember, the fallouts, the doubts, and the Jester temptation to stop the whole thing. I remember the cold winter giving up. I remember the massousive effort it took to rise up and run again, skinny, empty of conviction, flayed with self-unbelief, over and over until the business recognised us and the Jester was just a snigger in the effluence. I remember.

It should be quieter now, so they say, but I am watching the weather and the fact that this island is rated as the best weekend retreat in Scotland. I can see evidence of this. Not a single parking space in the main town, not even in the flux car park by the harbour, and it is nearly September, so the whole ‘kids going back to school’ is no longer true. The weather is shifting, the planet shifting and time has moved verily on in terms of the predicts of the old jigsaw. However, there is opportunity in this if acceptance and understanding and facilitation are ready, like the three musketeers, ready to face up to what now is and thus to adjust stirrups, or maybe change horses. Whichever way anyone looks it, if they do at all, the jigsaw is no longer predictable. The tangle has come in, and the jester too. Even as old as I am am, I can see it and I don’t want to be blind to any of it, even if it takes me some time to research and to understand.

To be honest, I am sad for some of my peers. Like me, they are olding, but some of them are glue-fixed to how it was and, thus startled,, at the least, when a dynamic we have all trusted, or learned to trust from parents, is jestered away, like mist. The jigsaw is what we trusted and it worked for decades. No longer. I like the ‘longer’ word. It proffers hope and continuance and i will take it. Does it, I wonder, remove the word predict from our language as so many other words have fallen away due to lack of use? I don’t know, and the ‘don’t know’ of these times enlivens me. Learning, as I have for some years, to live alone, to work my own jester problems out, even in the dark months, strongs me. I won’t say it is my choice because it isn’t, but the what is of ‘is’ is where I am and I love life with a passion. Tangle? Jester? I still love the jigsaw, the pleasant picture, the endless blue of a seascape wherein the nightmare of a clock of deep sea creatures confounds me with the seaswirl of itself

There is always tangle. Always a jester.