Mother

by

Island Blog – A Softening, Perhaps

On the track, the snow is dibbled, pecked and scribbled. Footprints slideside with others, creating giant boots, the skitter of bird, claw of dog, a circle and a stop. The pines, spruce, fir and thuja overhang the track, endless fingers luffing in a breeze that whispers thaw, falling drips to pepper the snow, and deeply. I see that other walkers have, mostly, kept to the midships of this snowfull track, each side flattened by big ass tyres, pressed into a slipslide. 

When a thaw is coming, it makes noise. My neighbours will notice that noise, as snow slides and crumps to the ground, but I won’t because I have no insulation in my loft. Their roof holds the snow. Mine shucks it off. It laughs me, when I’m not worrying about it. As I walk, I can hear the trees register a change, a lift from the stasis of snowfreeze. They creak and groan like old men lifting from a chair (or being told to do the washing up) and I stop to listen and to lift. You old buggers have been standing here since 1840. You have seen so much, heard so much, learned so much, withstood so much. I know you can keep on keeping on. I imagine an eye roll at my retreating back.

Turning into the Fairy Woods, where the beeches ghost, I notice where the thaw is slow.  Needle spread underfoot, no birds, no song beyond the scrawing screech of a jay, the ground is still hard, still snow covered. It wonders me. Does the earth feel the warmth of snow cover, as would a polar explorer, Inuit, Bear? Perhaps it is kind of cosy below that duvet of ice crystals, soft and almost motherly. Usually we have slice-rain, sleet and unkind slapdunk. Perhaps you like this new thing? I ask and something rustles.

Rounding, I tramp the track homeward, keeping to the midship. Younger trees stand here, scalped and ghosted but just resting, really. They will return in Spring. On this track, the thaw is more obvious, not on the track itself, but beside it. The dance of endless birds leave their prints, the pock mark of thaw-drips pepper the besides. Everything was covered yesterday, covert, hiding truths. Today, a softening. An opening, perhaps.

by

Island Blog – RIP Old Friend

I knew it was coming but not when. Meantime, not knowing the ‘when’ part, my days continued ordinary and soft, although the sadness lifted my ruffles from time to time making me shiver. Those around his bed would know more, I knew that, just as we had known as we watched our own ‘him’ move invisibly towards that other place whence no-one ever returns. He was ill, he was dying and yet the hold on life seems to me to defy even intense pain and the desire for it all to end, for a life to end. Life is a strong force indeed, no matter how careless we may be around the years we live it. We hold on and hold on and why, when it is clear to everyone, to ourselves, that death is in the room patiently waiting for our fingers to let go.

I picture an image of those children, now with children of their own, of my friend, his wife, around his last bed. I know the taste of exhaustion, the longing for it to be over, the fear of just that. I know the smell of dying, the sound of it in raspy and hesitant breaths, the lift of gallows humour among the watchers, laughter flying around the room, small fry defence against the enormity of what lies before them all. A whole long life almost gone but not quite, no, another breath, the rise of it a sinking inside the room. Let him go. Let. Him. Go. But he defies the wish and breathes on and on and on and the night watchers watch and there is tea and coffee for staying awake and stories to fill the room. Remember This? Remember when he, when we, that time on the beach, on the farm, during the thunder storm, when the dog died, that party, my wedding, my wedding, my wedding?

And his wife of over 50 years will be numb. What do you do after over 50 years as a man’s wife, as mother to his children? Does anybody know the answer to that? You were a young beauty back then, full of hope and sparkles and dreams, a real catch, they said, lucky him, they said, and he was. To be a farmer’s wife is no easy task. Nobody takes shifts, you just both shift and often at the drop of a hat, or a piglet or a calf. You rise from slumber because you have to. There is nobody else will take this job, not at this hour when night is still heavy black and dawn is miles away enjoying herself. You take it all on. So what happens to your dreams and hopes and sparkles? Ah…….good question, and here comes strength and spirit and the life force within and she has plenty of that, this new widow, my old friend.

I know what it is like to be a widow and I also know it has taken me over two years to even like myself in my solo role, one I yearned for so many times but had no clue about until he breathed his last. It was a relief, at first. Nobody wants to watch suffering after all, but that doesn’t last. I know that she will be busy and organised at first, dealing with admin and people and responding to sympathy cards et lala , but about two months in, it hits like a demolition ball, wheeching the feet out from under and with just cold ground on which to land. I wish I could wish this away for her but I cannot. I know the impact of this explosion will be huge for his children but not in the same way. She is now alone in her lovely cottage and no amount of warmth from the range and the fires will un-chill her, because, and I am only observing here, her marriage, like my own, was a traditional one (although she is a lot feistier that I) and he will have taken care of things she never had to learn.

And so, it is. It makes no difference at all that he was of a ‘good age’ as if that makes it acceptable. The death of a life is never that. A whole person is gone, all of the irritations, all of the expectations, frustrations, criticisms, encouragements, smiles, rejections, affection and direction has hit the final buffers. We are now arriving at Death Station where this train will terminate. Just like that. Just today. He is gone. RIP old friend.

by

Island Blog – Relichenship Opportunity

Lichens. Those pretty white or yellow, green or orange growths on rocks, fences, tree trunks, that’s Lichen. A symbiotic combination of two very different life forms, one Algae, one Plant. Neither, in this environment, in this beauty, in this force of life can survive alone. They only ever make the One that they create by combining forces and turning that meld into a whole new thing. How extraordinary is that and yet it isn’t extraordinary at all. Think Man and Woman: think opposites, or apposites. Moving on.

I watch lichen daily, the flower of it, particularly now in the Autumn wetwetwet. For me it says Opportunity. But for what? Well, in the natural and Algae-Plant world, it means a new entity, a new persona. It can be, usually is, the same in the human world. After all, isn’t it true that when a couple are together, each member behaves as one instrument in a duet, each accommodating the other for mutual benefit? She might run around his needs and wants, allow his faults and failings (as she sees them) in order to keep things running smoothly, or it might be the other way around. I have witnessed both and those of us apart from this symbiosis will take our lead from them (or is it ‘it’?) with the same smooth running thingy as priority. It is also impossible to judge the inner workings of any human duet. Nobody else knows the real truth or can explain it any more than the most of us could explain the lichen dynamic.

However, where lichen lifts the eye into marvel, it isn’t always that way with a couple of humans. We can see what we see and shake our heads at the seeing, or we can shine up into a smile at what we imagine is the truth. Both times we are way wrong. It is better by far to observe, to only observe, without comparison and particularly without comparison to a romance novel, a Disney film or the soaps we might watch on a daily basis. I can find myself doing the judging thing, nonetheless. I can, also, feel the rise in me of the strong feminist but be careful, I warn myself, very careful. Men snicker about women and women snicker about men. I am great at snickering, but also very aware that what I allow to infect my thinking can grow long roots and become a very judgemental belief, a big tall tree that throws all the seedlings of hope, faith and love into a killing shade.

Relationships are driven, to a degree, from experience, from observing parents, from television or idealism. So, how do we refresh our thinking, my thinking, supposing that is that we want to? The way I work it is by noticing my thoughts, feelings and retorts that rise without my bidding, it seems. Triggers trigger reaction and the good news is that those reactions to something or someone observed can stay silently internal at first. The choice to opinionate without caution is my own. I may witness yet another downtrodden woman on the end of a short leash and feel a burn of fury rise from my boots, threatening conflagration, a forest fire, but I know the danger of speaking out and the pointlessness of doing so at all. Who am I, after all, to think I know all the details of this so called symbiosis? Nobody, that’s who, or is it whom? What I long to see is a tidal turn and this will only begin when we as mothers and fathers teach our girls and boys never to accept the leash, short or long, from anybody, man or woman, without aggression, with respect, with surety and confidence. Perhaps I dream. Maybe I do.

Lichen manages it and lichen is billions of years old. I live in hope that we humans will finally get it.

by

Island Blog – To be a Mother and Saying Farewell

An eclectic role for sure, if such is possible and if say it is then it is. Although I’m about to lose a lot in the translation of such a word, let me play. When a woman becomes a mother she is about as lost as a goldfish in the ocean, barely able to breathe, exhausted and completely lost. She finds no others of her species, everyone else being salt-friendly and busy. However, with this new little one, she knows that it is she who must be eclectically “IT’ for……for….where did he go? Oh, there he is over there, chuffing away to a sea snail who is not all that interested, and if he was it would take him at least three days to turn around for a look. She hasn’t got three days to spare. She is on demand every moment of every day plus seconds of panic, of despair, of constant checking. She is wild now, thinking wide, way beyond her understanding of normal thinks, and nobody, not even dad, gets anywhere near even if he or they might have an awfully good suggestion. She is all Bugger Off and tail swipes. She is deadly. She is Mother.

When she considered this Mother thingy, she might be forgiven for thinking Disney. However, Disney was obviously never a mother. The sweet glory of an instant co-ordination between mother and child is, I am sorry to tell you, a load of tripe. This baby is everywhere but where he should be. This baby shrieks loud enough to call in the Whales and upset the Navy in their sonar missions. What is this? Naval Officer Jenkins might ask, his eyebrows lost in his fringe, quizzical and holding out the ear plug thing for his upline to hear. The whales, happily traversing 35 continents via the swirl and twist of oceans, stop and founder. Let me tell you, a founder among traversing whales can cause a tsunami 10,000 miles away, upsetting fisher boats and slopping Lady Merriweather’s gin all over the Captain of a luxury cruise ship, thus informing him that she is a secret drunk and that his trousers are in an embarrassing state. The butterfly effect, sort of.

This day my firstborn, taller than me by about half a mile, left again for his next shift as ship’s Captain and no matter his age and height, I am that goldfish mama again. When he is here, everything is wild again, everything is fun, anything is possible. His attitude to life is upbeat and can-do. I wonder who taught him that. Does he remember upsetting the Navy, the fishing boats and the whales with his baby screams, or me with his curiosity? I doubt it. But I remember. And now, when he is gone I go back there, back into that ocean, back to where it all began. Tomorrow another son departs and I swirl inside the loss of them even as I know I gain more just because I am their mother; because I am the only one they will ever have; because I have the memories of this shared time and those memories are enough, have to be enough.

It isn’t that I want to be ‘IT’ anymore. I don’t, but don’ting doesn’t stop the feelings, doesn’t weaken the bond. I never knew it would be like this. I doubt any mother does. But here it is and for us all. Confounded still, up and down with the whole gamut of role changing at every level all day and well into the darkling nights, still learning, still thinking eclectically, I am at the heart, a mother and one who will never not be. Not never. And, for all the sadness at saying farewell, it is enough. It has to be.

by

Island Blog – Tigger

The trouble with me, or one of the many troubles with me, is my Tigger bounce in the early mornings. It’s ridikkerluss. I must have driven my children mad with all that early bouncing, especially on school days. Waking in this ‘darking’ at 3.30, wide awake, excited about nothing and everything, I have to get out of bed. Thank you bed, I say with a reassuring pat, as it’s a bit startled. Most people, I add, would just turn over but I never believed in turning over anything with the exception of new leaves, naturally. I would be marvellous on early shifts in, say, a hospital. I would burst into the ward, my smile leading the way. Good morning! I would sing, as I reinflate the flagging night watch, flip on the kettle, brew coffee and head off to cheer the post and pre-ops, soothe the sad and weary, have a blether with the janitor and make him laugh but not too loudly, naturally.

By 6 I have cleaned the cobwebs and wiped the walls that have been hidden behind the Family Furniture for decades. The walls look startled too, suddenly aware of their nakedness. The cobwebs are all fluff and dark materials; very dodgy, but easily removed with my eco cleaning spray and a determined scrubber hand. Before I wipe them away for ever, I watch the way the webs float and lift as I pass, like wisps of smoke. I check for lodgers, but they have already scuttled off into a safe corner, probably temporarily blinded. I can see where the painter didn’t paint, couldn’t reach behind the Family Furniture. I pause to wonder who will buy these big pieces, who will thrill at the very sight of them, a must-have for the perfect place inside their home. I wish them and the furniture many blessings and a very happy life together. And, good luck polishing those brass knobs. I am done with brass knob polishing for ever. I have also moved furniture, stacked books and it’s not 7 yet.

I blame my mother. She was just the same. I remember us going to visit when the kids were young. I was up early, but himself, who could sleep all night and longer, remained in bed. Mum wasn’t having any of that nonsense and she wheeched off the duvet revealing his naked splendour and tickled his toes whilst singing something nobody recognised. He never got over it, not for years and years. Ah, well, I told him. You are not alone in this. Most people never get over my mother. So thanks Mum for the Tigger in me, the mischief, the fun and the way you were the most impossible woman who ever lived and probably always will be.

Unless I take over that role, of course.

by

Island Blog – Quietation

I could write this. ‘As the leaves abandon their mother ship, as the track is littered with jewels of gold, red, green and brown, as the cold snips at my bare legs, still bare-legged for as long as possible, I don’t mind.’ But I do mind these widow days. I pretend I don’t for everyone to see and to hear. That’s what I do, what I learned from other widows, from my granny, from my mother, from his mother. The widow lot is barely a patch of earth, not enough to grow a new house, a new home. No. We, who are suddenly alone when alone is not what we ever wanted, not for one minute even as we longed for alone just once or twice when the significant other was driving us daisy crazy, are now alone. With hours, mornings, breakfasts, afternoons, god bless the length of those feckers and with the rest of our lives.

So what is the rest of the whole nonsense? Is it padding about in slippers till midday? Is it frocking up for nobody to see, no matter how many frocks and how cautious the layering? Is it cooking for one when every mortal thing in the shop caters for two? Is it knowing that nobody will ever ask a widow to join them for supper and a load of wine because then they, the nobodies, will have the added trouble of making sure that the widow gets home without battering a fence or ending up in a ditch, her with her car and its slant towards the eastern sky no matter how canny she may or may not be with the wheel for steering?

I laugh at myself. I know, I know, that all the young folk, all those snatching at the skin of their ‘other’ have no idea how lucky they are. To have that argument once again, that nonsense that only ever arises from two, one of which who thinks they are ‘one’ and the other who is certain they are not and will never be, would be grand.

I quiet. There is a lot of quiet now. I will find my way but even as I write this I know I will ding up like a firework in the morning, just to make everyone else feel good.

by

Island Blog – Circle, Cheat and Language

I write much about the circle, the cycle of life and death. My belief is that we are too afraid of both. We take life for granted, afraid that the life we know will be taken or destroyed and when that life is threatened or stolen, we cannot accept it. Well, I get that bit. When someone beloved dies it is nothing less than catastrophic. But death? If we could step back a bit we might just be able to acknowledge that nothing lasts forever, no-one lasts for ever. That sounds sensible, as long as I am not the one with the beloved who died. It doesn’t matter how it happens, expected, sudden, too young, too soon, it always cuts like a knife and that wound takes forever to heal, if, indeed it ever does.

So how do I walk my talk? I have no answer right now because each time I hear of a young life snuffed out before that person had a chance to shine, I feel a punch in my gut. This is not right. This is not the order of things. Life is a cheat. I look for reasons even if I really don’t want to find them. I hesitate and dither. I want to see that vibrant person laughing across the table from me, that snapshot that I take into my heart and fix on my wall. I don’t want to think about any pain or struggle. I don’t want to know that someone as young or younger than my own children has gone. I cannot imagine the grief of a parent in the face of a young death, their chances of ever recovering. It is a stone too big and too powerful with ripples that go on and on and on.

So, I am not so smart about death, it seems. As much as I would like to be as peacefully accepting as those in cultures who are taught about loss and about death as an honourable and inevitable place of spirit and connectivity, I founder on the rocks. I know those damn rocks and have foundered and foundered, not when my husband died because his death was sort of natural and his age made it all sort of okay, but when a child dies. A child dies. It is too much to bear. I sit here, useless and sad, wondering and clueless. I can do nothing, say nothing because I know nothing about this and I pray I never will. My mum died first and that is how it should be, but it is no given, as I know.

I honour anyone who knows what it is like to bury a child, however old that child was. I know a few and when I think of them I stand on tippytoe, on the rocks, waving like a fool because what else is there to do in the onslaught of such a storm? They are alone and will always be, in that grief. I ache for mother, for father, I wave for them but I am not them. I am a million miles away with all children intact and with a heart full of sadness. Life is a cheat, but so is Death. We just don’t know the language of either.

by

Island Blog – Some Time and the God Mother

Recently I have watched change develop, a responsive change to what is happening with the season. Local dog walkers are now clad in jumpers, one or two (jumpers) I recognise from last year, at a similar time. They sauntered by in teeshirts and shorts, it seems like moments ago. Was I asleep for days? Did I miss something and, whilst I did this sleeping thing, did the weather send these goodly folk into their drawers for a wheeching out of warmer kit? No, I didn’t sleep, rarely do, so it wasn’t that. Maybe the gods of weather flipped a switch, laughing at us down-belows and deciding to stir things up a bit, because body language speaks volumes. Instead of ‘sauntering’, these folk are bowed, bent and clad in plastic. Where before they walked with jaunty air companionable with time as if it was a holiday stretching out for days, they now march, get out, get back, wet and longing for a hot cuppa, teeth gritted, defences up against the sideways rain avoiding puddles deep enough to sink a vicar. I feel it myself, the oh-god-do-I-have-to thing pre dog walk. I resent, big time, the reach for the plastic covering, the boots. I feel irritation as the doglet pauses to sniff at every other blade of grass, yanking her on and then carrying the guilt of grumpy yanking for another half mile, at least. Walks are shorter, faster, marchier. Dammit.

Then I remember the discomfort of change. Ah…….yes. Every time a season changes it feels too soon, even when the coming season is Spring and this is why. I like to know where I stand within my environment, my life. I want ‘ordinary’ to remain so, even as I absolutely don’t. Eventually, I get comfortable with the change until it isn’t change at all. It just is as it is. The in-between time, when I am on the cusp of things, I swither, feel out of sorts, resistant. It’s not anticipation of a seasonal change because it slam dunks me. I don’t know what it is, and I get bored of myself looking for reasons. I work not to be crabbit. I poke about in my insides to find some explanation and find none. This finding none thing also irritates me. I like an answer, that lovely well-honed explanation, much like a well-penned musical phrase that jitters, lifts, curves and flows down to an Aha. Nothing. Dammit again.

When dressing these chillsome mornings, I paint my way through my frock layers. This, yes, that, maybe, and this one onatop. No, try again, and again and again. What is wrong with me? For many lovely months I just rose from beneath my duvet, picked up this or that for its colour, or shape, or layering power. Now I am a snivelling child of a morning, with no power at all. I realise, I know, as I write this, that it is a First World problem. I remind myself of that as I stomp down the stairs to yet another dark morning. Is it morning at all?

There are so many who dread mornings. There are so many who have left their last ever morning behind, lost like a full stop in the dark. I have frocks and choice. I have Autumn and change. I have rain-soaked dog walks. I have Christmas ahead, visits from family and friends, my children, their partners and the grandchildren. I have my eyes, my ears, my legs, my face, my arms and a choice for dinner. I have enough money, enough warmth, enough light, enough dark to remember the full stops for others. Again I ask, what is wrong with me?

The Soft Voice comes to me. Nothing, she says, this God Mother, Nothing at all. You are but human (the ‘but’ bit clicking me into pause. And, she continues, there may well be another day, another morning. There may not, but there may be. Keep living, not just breathing. Keep fannying about with your frock talk, keep dithering and swithering and be grumpy if it helps. All is allowed, is normal. But one thing……

Yes? I ask.

You have one time, some time. Use it, dance with it, in it, play with it, have fun with it, make it hilarious and precarious, vicarious, salubrious, nefarious, whatever. But notice which and what. Choose from your own ground, your own roots, where and when you will spread and when you will flower.

She’s wise, the God Mother.

by

Island Blog – If This Life

I love audio books. While I sew or cook or fanny about, I listen to those who know a deal more than I. If I run water for washing dishes or flip the electric kettle on to boil I must needs whack up the volume or hold my phone to my ear, but you could never say I am not committed. Is that a double negative…….?

My books could be scientific, factual or fictional fairyness. I love love both. This began during covid and isolation even before himself left the planet. I love to read an actual book and do so at night, pre sleep, but the thing about an audio book, if I like the reader voice, is that my brain absorbs it in a different way. I couldn’t tell you in what way different, but I am aware that the information I can take in from a very factual book is something I could never cope with as an eye reader.

So and thus, I can listen to some tricky stuff on audible. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Gabor Mate. Why Love Matters, Sue Gerhardt. Eish I could never read than stuff in a book, stuff I want to hear because even at my age, I am curious and keen to understand and to learn. The former book is on addictions stemming from childhood abuse or neglect. The latter on the effect of parenting on children and its subsequent manifestations. Yes, I know, tough, and most of us won’t go there because we can’t face the guilt, but what I am discovering is not what I feared. We do the best we can, clueless like every new parents are, as they always have been and always will be. I have felt sharp heart bites and warm yesses. I have remembered being present yet absent (aka distracted with guests, husband etc) and that hurts, but I hope I gave the warmth and love and attention to my children at the times they most needed that from me. We mothers are so quick to take the blame, the blood red tsunami of it, upon ourselves. I know this.

With my own mother and many of her generation, there was no desire to look back over the child rearing years. What happened happened. What was done or said was done or said, belonging only in the past and the past is dead as a dodo. My own generation initiated a change in that thinking, deciding to do things differently because we knew we were damaged by a Victorian-ish upbringing to some degree or another, and wanted our own children to feel more obviously loved. Although that old nonsense of ‘this will hurt but it’s for your own good’ still came into my head when some sort of retribution for a crime committed was required, I remember thinking long and hard about a kinder way of getting the same message across. I wasn’t always so clever. Kids drive you bonkers and always at times when your own chips are down. I lashed out in anger at times and the regret and shame consumed me. I learned to say I Am Sorry, something my parents never said. Keeping that regret and shame quiet is very damaging to the self, to both selves in fact.

Listening to these audio books and more besides is not doing me any harm at all. When I relate to something the writer says, something either painful in recollection or uplifting and empathetic, I have the choice to take any action required. The intelligence, backed up by scientific research on children (and I was one once) helps me to smile at myself as a faulty mother. It also kinds me towards my own self as a little girl who believed in fairies and happiness and who was astonished and hurt to discover that her own mother was also faulty and broken. I now know why but I didn’t back then. She, who never got from her own mother the love she needed, did not have the benefit of information available to me and to future mothers and fathers. Knowing this as I do now, affords me the chance to empathise with her, to understand why she was who she was and to love and appreciate her backwards.

It does take courage and the willingness to be vulnerable to read or listen to such information, but if this life is the only one I get, then I want to get to the end of it knowing I have understood myself to a high degree, to have made amends wherever I could and to have learned that we are all broken humans with a huge capacity for loving and understanding others and ourselves. And it is never too late to learn something new.

by

Island Blog – Ebb and Flow, Days of Minutes

This life without himself can feel like a loss even thought he was (often) a pain in the ass. As, I imagine, was I. The days are minutes to be filled, and I am advised thus:- to write my list of things I want to do in this new life when nobody ever asked that question in the old one. Not never. It begs the question. What do I want? Well, I don’t know. Can someone tell me please because I know that place, a place of ‘no I don’t agree’, of ‘seriously….what?’ of ‘okay then, if I have to.’ This is my comfort zone which btw has abandoned me. The peripheries of my world are blown like a bubble burst and the world beyond is one scary zero. I turn back. I oftentimes (love that word) do. But what I turn back to is a day of minutes and there are many, oh so very many. So, I don’t like this minute thing. I don’t like this nothing, nowhere, nobody thing. So what? Hmmmmm. So what.

I was once alone, for about five minutes having been expelled from school(s) and college and my first job. Sacked. I was, so they told me, a muttering disturbance, a rebel in the corridors of whispers. Had I been not me, I probably might have led a revolution but I was never that courageous and I laud the ones who did, who will do in times to come. I was taught to be a lady. Not to upheaval, not to upset, but nobody taught me the wisdom of being such a creature. It isn’t about being a doormat. No. Being one of those lady women is to be wise living with attitude. within structures, confines and male domination without aggression, without fight, without loss of self, but clever enough to get what this lady wants. I wish I had learned it from my mother’s milk but she had not the skills to help me there. I am learning them now.

So, I walk, run, dance, play within the minutes of days. No, it is more than that. I am loving the journey. Yes there are times I wring my ankle on memories, on moments, but I am still a dancer. I watch my bone-awkward fingers as I work my keyboard. I say, hallo, swollen joints, well done you. Just see what you have done, achieved over the minutes of days in your life. My toes, bent and bony, my body skinny and scarred. Hallo you all. Well flipping done.

And then, suddenly, as though my thinking has been heard and taken to heart, in comes the painter to redecorate the upstairs rooms, ridding them of short term history, the falls, the clutches at cupboard doors pre a fall, the rust, the grease smears, the smoke of an old pipe. All opened up in brilliant white, fresh, the promise of a new future, a new strength of days. Then comes the gardener, to cut my grass. I kept my grass long, my dandelions fierce for the bees and butterflies till now and he gets that. Now the bees and the butterflies are sucking from the bluebells so it doesn’t feel so bad to cut the heads off my favourite butter yellow sun-followers.

This is the flow. People come in. Someone leaves the table. Nobody else can take that seat, but the loving hands that reach out can somehow help the day of minutes into something else, something that has new life, that can move on into more days, more minutes and can, with their investment, change everything.