giggle

Yesterday I bought a wrap-over skirt, a pretty flowery thing with two scoops, a gap, flounces and a curvy hem. Obviously, it also sported ties for the wrap-around palaver, but no holes for one tie to go through. Even in the fitting room I felt a wash of anxiety roll over me, the no hole fact showing me losing my skirt in a public place. It would fall to the ground but not leave me because the ties would remain tied and this would assuredly result in my being stuck in the middle of a right fankle, unable to go forward or back without falling flat on my face. I brushed the image aside and the feelings associated, that rush of shame as I revealed my bottom in her ancient knickers, my old flabby thighs, the flopskin of my belly a glaring white light for all the world to see or, at least, those sharing the pavement with me. Go away, image, I hissed because I liked the skirt, had arrived in Africa skirtless and those pretty tops have hung miserably on their hangers inside a dark cupboard, longing for a skirt companion with accompanying mutters. It, the skirt, was also the only item of clothing in the store made of cotton. All the others were made of some slimy material that made me shudder. Slimy clings, slimy is hot, slimy is, well, slimy.

Back home I try the skirt on with the pretty top that doesn’t match. Obviously. We look nice together, me, the skirt and the top that doesn’t match and I pirouette before the long mirror, feeling intact and rather attractive. Then I begin to move about, making coffee, breakfast, clearing this, tidying that and that’s when I sense mutiny. The ties, as I had imagined, are busy working loose from the waistband of the skirt. I check. There is a gap of at least 3 inches between the ties and the skirt, a spread of lardy fat poking through. Singularly unattractive. I have only moved a few short paces, not walked far at all, and that image of my cotton collapse returns in technicolour. What to do? I know, I will make a hole, just snip one with scissors, no need to bind the edges, it’s only small after all. This done, I thread one tie through and tie a bow behind. That’s better. Only it isn’t. Still the mutinous skirt is determined to have her say, to establish control over me, and, although the result is not quite the same, I now notice one side of this damn skirt hanging lower than the other as the ties fight the waistband for supremacy. Who on earth designed this flaming skirt and got away with it, and not just once? There were at least ten of them on the rail when I selected my size. Do the designers not check a wrap over skirt for flaws, send some woman out hiking in it, up a mountain preferably, just as a car manufacturer would send new vehicles for a test drive (up a mountain preferably) or a lipstick maker trial a lipstick to check it doesn’t run into a woman’s chin wrinkles or set like concrete in hot sun thus giving her a permanent pout? Hasn’t someone tried this skirt out, worked in it and walked in it? Or did the designer just like the pretty flowery look of the thing with its scooped edges, flounces, a gap and a curvy hem and say This’ll Do, the stores are waiting for delivery?

I admit skirt defeat and remove it, apologising to the pretty tops that don’t match, obviously, and they go into a sulk. I can hear them muttering as I close them back into the dark. I consider my mistake in not listening to my instincts in that fitting room, in being tempted by pretty flowers and something new. How often do I do this? Too often.

As to the damnably mutinous skirt, I might cut it up to use as material for something else unskirt-ish one day just to hear it squeal. As I shut it up with the tops, frock back up and flounce away, I swear I hear it giggle.

I walk today through soft air, breaking into it, splitting the atoms then turn to watch them come back together at my back, as if I was never there at all, leaving no evidence of my passing, not even footprints for the track is mostly dry. This is a relief, the dry track I mean, after months of slopping mud, the backlash of mudfreckles peppering the backs of my legs. Larch fronds dangle, long green fingers, the sycamore blossoms buzzing with bees. They sound like tiny airborne motorbikes. Coniferous giants, evergreen through the coldest of months push out just a little, bright lime against the winter-tired needles the colour of wine bottles. Even the fallen trees push out hope, in parts, still working with the sun, still holding on to life. These huge giants, felled in some vindictive gale, remind me of another giant of a man felled a few days ago, gone. Somehow, when a person I know goes down and stays down, one who lived a few doors away from my own, it feels sharp, needle sharp. He was about my age and always out walking, always full of craic and laughter. Although he will not know this Spring, not from this earthly place anyway, I will think of him whenever I walk along the little track, one he loved as well as I do.

I wander on, noticing with my usual gasp of delight followed by a greeting spoken out loud, new buttery primroses along the bank, more leaves coming here and, oh look, over there and even way up there! Violets too, tiny delicate lilac petals peeking out from behind the protection of a rock or a drystone wall, sudden lifts of pastel beauty, wood anemones too, or their foliage at least. Tree ferns fall from on high, way up the bellies of the great old trees, like tiny green waterfalls. They tremble as a luff breeze tickles them. I can almost hear them giggle. Rounding the apex of my walk, I watch for seals hauled out on the rocks, listen for their song, but they are not here this day. I say hallo to a beech tree who began her answer to the questioner sun by pushing out as far as she dared before turning her face upwards. She is a force indeed to be admired for her belly is wide, her backbone strong and she is a fine match for the others who grew straight up from a straight up beginning.

It ponders me.

The sun poses the question. He sends warmth and nourishment. He calls out the bees, the butterflies, the dragonflies and all the other buzzing things of which we are not quite so fond, the answerers. He rises the earth, eats it up, challenges it, is relentless yet life-giving, pulling up life from the nearly dead, just for one more summer, just one more, don’t let go yet, the Mother needs you, you and her little clueless people. And we, too, are answerers. We rise into the new warmth with smiles that need cranking up a bit as Winter finally feels the threat of meltdown and begins his retreat. We change our attitude, become more open like petals, delicate but trusting. We risk vest off, open more windows, sit awhile on a tree stump or a bench to listen as passing talk tells her tales of other lives, other hopes and dreams. We catch moments, moments that didn’t seem to exist behind our winter walls, sounds drowned out by lashing rain, sleet, and witchy winds.

Soft now. Let it be. Let us and others be. Questioner or Answerer, both are we. We can shine light in places without light. We can be curious about how someone else thinks, how they live. We can show that we care, that someone else matters just as we hope we do ourselves.