lipstick

My roses are ridonculus. This year, despite being cut down to their knees last Autumn, they have risen like blooming lamposts. They know, they have to, that wind and WIND cometh, and daily, along with slews of rain, a veritable slam-dunk with potential collapse. But, they don’t do that collapso thing, not like the beech limb, that sweet strong gone-thing that prevents my traverse in the most polite of ways in that it fell whilst I was not beneath its massive tonnage. I see the black, the ingress of rain for perhaps decades, the finite a silent given, but not to me, not to all of us who wandered beneath the bow and the beauty of this superb and wonderful spread. We, human we, didn’t think at all. We just lifted an overhang, leaf heavy, and for so many walks and talks and unthinks.

Today, returning from work, I saw something, a definite some-thing at the side of the track, and moving. A buzzard low and just above this moving thing, taunting, dunting, a significant part of the moment. I slowed my mini (she doesn’t like to slow, so there was a tussle) and looked. An otter, an OTTER, right there beside me, slid into the ditch, then paused and looked right at me. It’s face, its eyes, my face, my eyes, we collided. Then, it grabbed the hen it had pinched from……where for goodness sake? There is nothing and no-one here, not for miles. That eye connection champagnes my insides and, for a bit, whilst Mini grumbled, I could not press play. I was in the wild and I didn’t want to leave. The. otter did, lifting over ferns and rocks until all I saw was the nothing I had expected pre this sudden eye-catch, this adventure. It thought me.

Adventure, risk and the wild is not for some, but for us all. We just have to see everything and to seek something beyond and above the usual, the what we’ll have for dinner, the whose turn it is to take the kids to their groups, the grind of expectation and disappointment. I remember being there, but please don’t think that just because my kids are born and gorn that everything becomes marvellous, because that is a myth. I began being ridonculus at 21, deciding to see the wild, to risk adventure, to find connection with my people, who were not always my family. It is a choice. I ask myself, and daily, Who Am I in this Here and Now? The answer comes. You Know Who You Are. And the voice is right.

One day I drove to the harbour, knowing one of my boys had parked there. I also knew I wouldn’t see him, but that didn’t matter. I found his big ass buckie and pulled out my pink lipstick. I drew a huge heart on the driver window and wrote I LOVE YOU, right across the windscreen. No-one saw me. Chuffed, I walked back to my car, passing, oh dear, passing, his buckie, I knew it, his stuff, his order, his things and thought, oh holy shit! I just defaced an unknown’s glassware. Then, the wild in me, the adventure, laughed me and I did it all again. As I hiked my wee car up the hill and away, I did wonder what the other guy felt as he came back to such a message.

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.