Old

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Island Blog – A Bimble

The days rove on, and, if I don’t have my specs on, they can rove on without me. I. have noticed this, waking into a Friday which suddenly became Thursday. Maybe I found this Thursday Alert in the local shop on questioning the lack of a weekly veg delivery, or perhaps I arrived for a Friday appointment a full 24 hours ahead, all dressed up and alert and toting my picnic. My life is nothing but adventurous and that’s for sure, but the difference to what was, is that it seems the adventure is heading somewhere all by itself. I can catch up, but I am not always the leader, as I once was. Who would have ever thought that things would string away from me in such a way? It laughs me, mostly. I kind of like the olding time, the way I can explode into a puzzled somewhere, all dressed right and with my picnic. Times, yes, it is mildly inconvenient, but with a mostly empty calendar, I can come back again on the right day. It thinks me.

Once (was it once….no it was not) I knew the date. School, children, business, bookings, all of that. The suddenness of old age surprises me. It may surprise others, but they are careful not to hi- light my appearing, just in case I wobble off my perch t’wirly. I remember this with my own mum, but never thought it would come to me. This old ness. No. However, it is here. I walk daily, but it is a bimble, a cautious wander over the rocky track I used to tramp beneath my boots sans thought. Perhaps this olding bollocks is a result of last year, cellulitis, cancer, beloved dog dead, perhaps. Perhaps.

But nonetheless, I will be ongoing, I will plant my feet in every day, even on the wrong date. Honestly, I believe in b**gering on. Our dad taught us that, and now I am here, all alone but living in the most beautiful place in the whole world, and with a strong community of like-minded dafties living just down the village, it doesn’t matter what day it is. A day is a day. The date matters now and then, but not much.

And, within each day there is the promise of adventure, even if I have to catch up with it.

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Island Blog – Revenance

It’s been a while, awhile. Interesting, is it not, how words play with our brains? Two words mean one thing and when conjoined, another, pulling me in to play their game, feeling me free to challenge the shapeshifters, as I oftentimes do.

I am a revenant. One who has returned, and I quote from the dictionary, ‘especially supposedly (no commas, I notice) from the dead’. I recall meeting no dead folk during the process of being nearly dead, although my day and night visions were somewhat weird. It was all cat. A cat curled into my suitcase in broad daylight as I slapped ice packs on my swollen body, hearing the fizz like a water drop on fire. Another two cats, differently coloured, walking through my hospital room, reassuring. The End. Or so I thought with the whole cat thing, fever, sick, one of the nearly dead.

Now, and now, here I am back home to the island with two big sons. One breast is, like (!) what’s the fuss all about? T’other looks like the surface of the moon. The op was a ‘wide excision’, in other words the spider legs were a distance apart. A scoop was required, and the wotwot pulled together, hence the strange shape. The old girl has the usual sag. The new girl on the block sings a different song. I wonder how she will look once she gets over this puffed up, bruised, attention-seeking thing? I smile.

I do my exercises. I am tired, rest often, keep doing what I can do which is mostly hanging my twinkly winkly lights now that the sun goes down like a crashbang. I can reconnect with my frock stash. It’s like meeting old friends and we all love the Autumn and Winter, my frocks and me. The cold brings out our colours, layers and revenance. We can carefully layer, we who refuse to go un-barefoot, always bare legged and feeling, really feeling the seasonal change. No protection. It is a choice and one I made a thousand years ago. I need to feel it, feel all of the all of it, of everything. Wild, yes, but not to me. To me it is a rising into whatever comes next.

This life with all her fears and worries, her slapdash, her punches and losses, her sharp cuts and traumas, all give us a wild card. (I have no idea what a wild card is, but ‘wild’ works for me). I will always play mine. It doesn’t matter what a soul has had to face, has come through. There is no competition. We all face shit. We all have the rising in us. All of us.

We are revenants. All of us. And, ‘Revenance’, the process, will be a word in the dictionary one day, telling out that all of us have, and still are, rising from whatever became dead to us, another, a thing, an understanding, a relationship, a valuable something. I have not met another soul who hasn’t lost something, someone, an heretofore (!) understanding. We are so shit at taking this out into the world.

In the breast cancer ward, giggling with the surgeon about a load of wotwot, pre-op, I watched a cat, white and grey, move easy away through the doorway. I don’t have a cat. Or, maybe I have four.

Let us rise. We are revenants.

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Island Blog – Tumbletast

I’ve had many thinks about mental wellbeing, since forever, in truth, even when I was just considered ‘difficult’ and ‘strange’. And I was. The tumbletast of me scooried my brain into a storm. What was/is wrong with me, I wondered. Well, everything, pretty much. But see this. I was a girl and young woman of my time, a time when everyone would only whisper the word ‘mental’ as if the head bore no relativity to the body, as if a good person, aka, someone who obliged themselves into a nothing, a bland beige, almost invisible, was a female accepted. Now, in these times, we know better, but I do think about all the rest of those who spent their whole young life paddling backwards, bowing and scraping, apologising through gritted teeth, teeth that spent the long hours of a troubled night grinding together until they lost the ability to bite.

Now that I am old and gay (woman of my times), I chuckle at my flat top teeth and all that turmoil of youth because I now know that I, and others ‘of that time’ are strong fighters, and those who didn’t survive, well, I grieve their demise. I certainly do. What I met, or, rather, who (or is it whom?) along my journey of madness, were one, two, three, maybe four encouragers, older women and men who really saw me and, what’s more, liked and respected what they saw. It wasn’t family members, probably never is, but random meets, sudden lifters, a connection, and I could feel myself begin to flower. I no longer felt like a big clod in frilly frocks and hefty boots, but, instead, a young woman, a beautiful young woman, with a voice, one they wanted to listen to. In short, they believed in me. In me? It was an astonishing moment, one I barely trusted at first, awaiting a put down, a ‘go away you fool’, but it never came. My questions were considered, valued, and answered with an upwards inflection, inviting continuation. It was heady. It was random, It was only now and then in my tumbletast but I could feel my inner spin slow to a confident hum, even to a stop. I didn’t have to be who this person wanted me to be, expected me to be. I was allowed to be myself, not that I had a scooby who that self was with her mental bits totally off piste. I felt enchanting, intelligent, bright and lively. When I laughed too loud or said something that completely missed the point, nobody laughed, but only smiled and explained, without being patronising, or showing their own need to diminish another in order to elevate themselves.

I know I hide my madness well. I know, even in these times, that I am mad. I rather like the title. I see it not as a label, but as a recognition of myself. I am who I am. We all are. And what we need, like water, is for someone, now and then, to tell us, through eyes, smiles, connection, that we are just the one they want to talk to, to collide with, right now. It may be random, a bus shelter, a queue in a post office, a doorway to a hotel in the rain, and, you know what? That is exactly when it happens. Life is such that she proffers the random, and it behoves us to clock that, no matter the rush of the moment, the have to get through, have to watch for the bus, have to check my phone, have to this, have to that.

I recommend just looking around. I recommend saying hallo, and sharing a smile, and then asking Where are you going? or Hey, I love your smile, frock, boots, suitcase, handbag, whatever. We, of our times, who have got through Brexit, Covid and the ripples from the Russian attack on Ukraine, know in our hearts that connection with other humans is our survival. Only through that do we learn about them, about ourselves, and, as we pull apart and go our different ways, we will be holding each other in our thoughts. And this is so powerful.

My randoms changed my thinking about me. I had about four, in a 70 year life, but the power they lit up in my ‘mental’, has carried me all this way, and I thank them. I wish you all the same, with all my heart. I really, really do.

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Island Blog – The Tomorrowlands

This morning begins, for me, at a time that bothers me in its insistence. No! I almost shout but don’t, modifying my shout-ness, even though there is nobody else to hear, this is no longer acceptable, this 05.30 lark when even the larks are slumbering on. And, yet, my body clock ignores my remonstrations with the tenacity of a teenager. I give in and get up. The light is the right light, the morning light, and the day is dawning whether I like it or not. I do like it for I am an inveterate morning person. What does inveterate mean? I forget, but it fits because other people use it around such subjects as chips with vinegar, reading crime novels and gardening, to mention but three inveteration opportunities.

I digress. Risen and with coffee on the brew, I wander into the conservatory which is cold. The nights are cold, star-backed and sometimes frosty, a relief from the heat of the sun. I am not complaining. Sun and heat are rare gifts in this island life and nobody with a modicum of sense moans about the odd times we enjoy both of these together. Oh we know the sun is out there somewhere, behind a depth of cloud cover that could halt an entire Scottish regiment, a feat most opponents have historically failed to achieve, but the ability to get the old boy to push through has confounded us longtime. Wishing doesn’t cut it, nor do prayers. Weddings can, and have, capsized a whole bride. Nonetheless, we island on because the beauty of this lump of rock is second to none.

The day slows down as I feared it might. Some days are tortoises where they used to be hares, way back when a clamjamfrie of children, not all my own, plucked at my skirts for biscuits and pressed for attention, then disappearing alarmingly, returning just in time and in dire straits, when food was required every 30 minutes and when life had her hand in the small of my back. Move on, move quicker, MOVE! Now there are no such demands, no pressure from life, in fact she is now telling me, the skeerie minx, to slow down, to ca’ canny, to rest. But even as I dislike this sudden, for it feels sudden, lowering of my sails, it is here with me now and I must needs welcome it as I welcomed, and thanked, the spirited life in my limbs. I decide to shift the limb spirit into my mind. It seems to work. Instead of bemoaning a loss of spirit and strength, I welcome it into my thinking. It decides my thoughts which decide my feelings which decide my actions. I have learned this from life coaches, a few of whom, or is it which, are in my family, and I have imbibed the truth of it and taken it as ‘read’. Funny that word. Read sounds like ‘reed’ and we know what it means. Read sounds like ‘red’ and now we are much confused. Heaven knows how anyone can ever comprehend, pronounce or employ such tiddleypom when learning English, especially the old English, a language quite beautiful to me but if I were to launch into it in, say, a Glasgow pub, I might not get home at all.

I’m still digressing. What I wanted to communicate was and is that my day was slow. It took me half hour stretches of resistance to restlessness, holding, controlling my desire to lift, walk, move, and it thinked me of the sea, the waves on the beach, fretting at the sand as an old woman plucks at the bobbles on her old cardigan. I read a bit, walked a bit, went to the shore a bit, made a feta and spinach dip, a bit, sewed a bit and la la la. I know it is right and proper for my children to have their own lives. I celebrate that. I know that it is right that my old china is dead. I celebrate that too, because it was always going to happen and could have been so much more upsetting than it was. I know I am perfectly tickety-wotwot alone. And, I also know that there are so very many other people out there who know exactly how it all feels.

Slow days, they come, but the joy of living in this funny, clever, resourceful and dynamic community is something I treasure and will treasure again at 05.30 in the Tomorrowlands.

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Island Blog – A Bee, Curiosity and Instant Solutions

How do bees manage to fly sideways? In this African garden with its ebullience of fragrant blooms, I am of interest to the bees. One or two come over to me, perhaps beckoned by my floral perfume or perhaps I just look like a blooming shrub in my colourful frock. On the trajectory towards me, the bee flies straight, but once it arrives a few inches from my face, she swings from right to left, left to right, sussing me out, eyeball to eyeball. How does she do it? I google. It seems that a bee’s wings, both pairs of them, not only flap up and down but also can twist and rotate. How fantastic is that! It thinks me.

How flexible am I inside this life of mine? Do I flap up and down, moving either forward or back, or do I have the mental wings that can twist and rotate, thus allowing me to visit any situation or encounter using a lateral flow? I like to think I can laterally flow with the best of them, and I believe it to be a truth. I visit the sideways of things a lot, particularly when I am unsure-footed, continuing forward, but determined not to go back, because going back over old ground in any situation is not going to show me anything new, after all, now is it? However, there is often the temptation to replay the movie, to berate self for any trip ups back there, to wish I had done or said it differently, a thoroughly pointless exercise, a waste of mind energy, and fruitless, but we all do it now and again and some of us make a life of wishing the past was different.

Logic and emotion can be poor bed mates. I can know something, a fact, a truth, a way of behaving, but if I cannot feel the truth of it, know it in my heart, that ‘truth’ means little to me, much as the bee thought I was a blooming shrub. However, it’s deeply frustrating when that belief lasts only as long as it takes for something to trip me up, like a half-concealed boulder in my new path, the one I absolutely know to be the right one, logically speaking. The number of positive and upbeat wisdoms, particularly on social media, are beginning to irritate me, all those goodly truths serving only to tell me how often I fall short of their perfection. Learning how to accept that each ‘truth’ is something I need to experience personally as I keep moving along my path takes a degree of patience, not something any of us find easy. I want it now, this new understanding, not in ten years time for god’s sake! Other people get it straight away, so what is wrong with me? Your thinking, m’lady, that’s what is wrong, not you. Don’t think, but just keep buzzing along, use those wings to twist and rotate, work the muscles, fly sideways, checking out everything and everyone along the way. Be like a bee. And if a shrub turns out to be an old woman in a loud frock, so be it. Move on.

As I approach 70 years of age, an astonishment for me as I never thought I would pass 60, I take a look down the road from my past. 60, in my opinion, meant bad temper, lipstick smudged, hair, weekly permed into a helmet and sensible shoes and I wanted none of that. Nowadays, however, we are younger than our parents were, in thinking, in opportunities, in attitude and in engagement with younger generations. I don’t feel old at all and plan to remain not feeling old until I fall over for the last time. I have also found, eventually it seems, a confidence I did not have when younger. Although I cannot state with any lofty words that I know where I am going, because most of the time I do not, I am happy with that. If we stay curious, fly sideways as well as forwards, the occasional look back allowed but only to honour all we have gone through and survived, we birth ourselves again. We have inherited DNA, yes, but that doesn’t need to define our choices or actions today, right now. I am truly thankful for my ancestors, what they gifted me, the good and the ‘bad’. I am also deeply thankful that I am not a bee. My eyes are open, my limbs flexible, my curiosity a daily fascination as I can arrive in a strange place just like that, my mental wings ready to twist. I don’t wear lipstick nor do I have a permed head. I am not bad-tempered, nor do I own a pair of sensible shoes, running barefoot most of the time. I am prepared to face whatever the olding process sends my way. I will continue to read those uplifting truths because I never know which one will settle in for keeps, and, best of all, I no longer believe in instant solutions, because the only instant solution I can trust unequivocally, is me.

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Island Blog – Add New

That’s what it says when I click on ‘Posts’ on this blog. It thinks me in many ways. As I shower and dress up to join young friends for dinner inside the wildlife estate, I notice things, such as this:- One eyebrow has disappeared completely. Momentarily, I am somewhat scunnered, even as I know it is probably still there somewhere, well, not somewhere, but in the place it has always inhabited for many decades. I tip my mirror to MAGNIFIED and search again. There is the jist of it but now the other one, looking strong-ish and ‘there’, tipples my face lopsided. I attempt to colour it in, guessing the arch of it and check again. Now I look like an old woman without a map. I scrub off the colour, shrug my shoulders, and say What the Heck, or words to that effect. As I shrug my shoulders, the dewlaps beneath my arms activate. If I hold my arms almost above my head, they disappear, the dewlaps that is, but I cannot possibly sustain an entire evening thus. The young will think me bonkers and I won’t be able to eat a thing without taking the eyes out of my neighbour with a fork. I consider the dewlaps. If I was rounder, they wouldn’t be dewlapping at all, but I am not rounder and here goes another What the Heck. The rest of my make up routine is a right palaver, all guesswork and don’t look too closely as I apply eyeliner, mostly in the right place and mascara to patchy eyelashes. Spiders, I think, and chuckle. What, I wonder, do the young see with their 20/20 vision? Too bloody much is the answer, but wait. If I go wherever I go with enough twinkle winkle in my eyes, dewlaps, one eyebrow and all the rest, will it matter in the long run, the run of an evening, a load of 40 years olds with Granny? Probably not. So, methinks, tap chin, this is pretty much down to me and my attitude about me. As I move through the dewlap, one eyebrow and spiders sticking out of my eyeballs thing with the confidence of age, the history of losing things like body parts whilst acquiring others, am I not, all by myself, reversing their thoughts on ‘growing old’? How many young people, me included when I was actually young, have said they never want to grow old because look what happened to Granny or Uncle Mike or Aunty Bea? Well, maybe it wasn’t all sunshine for them and, for that, I am sorry. But if I can be just one old gal who just gets on with the process, then it’s worth stepping out there.

Today I received, as I often do, pictures of my 12 grandchildren doing things effortlessly, such as bending in half mid-air, or winning at hockey or cantering along a beach, no hands, or dressed in lycra with not a dewlap in sight. I see my own children strong, fit, altogether and jumping fences, leaping off boats, making big decisions that require effort and strength, determination and a clear mind. I had all of those, once, and that is something to celebrate. I had all of those, once. Now I don’t, not as I did. Now I falter at times, lose things like eyebrows and the next sentence, might find it harder to construct a shape to the next day. I forget a story I’m reading and have to retrace my steps. I see a crowd of people and feel lost. I struggle to chop wood. All perfectly ok if that is how I see it, because, because, I have done all of these things, with strength and confidence, no problem unsolvable, not when I was in the lead. And the dewlaps, scars, slight weakness of limbs, of mind, all are just as they should be. Will I whinge and whine about losing stuff? No, I will not. In the quiet of my mind, I will know what I know. I have seen what I have seen, lived to the absolute full and for a whole lifetime. A slowness and a thoughtfulness replaces the buzz to move move move, and that peaceables me.

So off I go into an African night, missing an eyebrow, yes, but not much else. If I Add New to my thinking, I am always beginning again, in whatever state. Now, where was I…..?

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Island Blog – Langtangle and Shoe Laces

As life moves on, moves me on to my 70th year, I have time to ponder, reflect and consider. I have the mind for it too, because it seems to me that now I am looking in a different direction, one I have never known before. When young and full of family life, its accompanying chaotic joys and disasters, my eyeballs swivelled every which way, conscious of what was about to happen, what had just happened and what the hell I could do to stop it happening again. Nowadays the happening thing is mostly my own choice. Setting aside responsive reaction, say to a burst pipe or a postal delivery, I am the Happener, inhabiting endless space and time, able and sometimes unwilling, to ponder, reflect and consider. My thoughts wander over old mountains, some conquered, some the conquerors, over wild moor and vast expanses of desert sand. Some pondering lead me to old crimes, my old crimes and I squinge with discomfort as the memory builds into a certain prison sentence. I retreat quickly because I know well how false a memory can be, constructed over time, bridges built to connect two sets of circumstance that never came together at the time. It chuckles me as I banish the imaginary ghoul of mismemory. Away with you! I say. You were never thus.

This morning my thoughts, floating like tumbleweeds over tundra, billowed by a backwind, turn to what we leave behind and the list is long. Physical and metaphysical knowledge, recipes, familial data, skin flakes, nursery rhymes, stories of this and that, music, poetry, habits, opinions, demands, mistakes, gifts, DNA, clothing preferences, reactions, attitudes, diaries, kindnesses and so much more, our legacy. Such an unattractive word I think for such a potentially wonderful thing. So what do I want to leave behind when I am no longer here? A cloud of gas or a flight of light and beauty, peppered with humour and fairies? I know my answer to that and if I want to achieve such levity I must needs make certain of it because it is my choice and nobody else’s. How I choose to enter this part of my wonderfully ridiculously rambunctious life is a daily consideration. Not for me a decline into the grumps, nor the moans, nor the fatalism I had witnessed in my own now dead forbears who, bless their loving hearts, probably didn’t think they had any choice at all. My full of nonsense mother once said, and firmly, to me “There was no such thing as positive thinking in my day.” And she really believed that. However, these days we know different, that attitude is everything, regardless of circumstance, blight, long winters, loneliness, loss and no sourdough bread left in the village shop. We may not be able to ice skate upright, open jars of jam or lift a sack of potatoes but we can always laugh at ourselves, accepting that it is not our time for such shows of prowetic strength and besides we can always ask for help. Perhaps this time of quietening down is fulsome and maybe necessary for our young. In this age of Granny or Grandad, we can observe, soothe, stravaigle, consider and encourage, even if we barely understand what it must be like for young folk in this fast-paced, sometimes dangerous technological time. But we can teach observation, ask gentle questions, read together, wander over ancient ground, speak of the land, the sky, the sea, the winds with stories on their backs. We can show the mysteries of life, teach rhymes and songs, gift our time, time and more time because we have time now and they do not, not yet, not whilst life is a dash and a hurry, a fight, a competition, a langtangle of skids and slips, of leaps and crashes, of information invasion.

It was the same for us, many many years ago, and we remember the turmoil of growing up. Now we are growing down and I knew it yesterday as my eldest son walked into the church to watch the children’s nativity play. I used to be a foot taller, I thought, as he loomed over me grinning. I am shrinking. Good. That is fine with me and it means I can hide under a table with the children, with the giggles and the shushes and the chance to tie the adults shoe laces together.

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Island Blog – Amen to that

I walk out, barefoot, onto the morning grass, feel the cool bite of it, the ice chill thrill up my legs. It’s early morning and the birds already line the staves, making what sounds like the beginning of a piece of music. I’m coming, I tell them, armed as I am with seed, with hemispheres of nourishing fat. I watch the sun lift from his eastern bed, the clouds turning fringe-pink, the blue mountain defined as if by a black marker. I see late bats scoot through the dawn, a pair of early ravens cawk overhead, a five of Brent geese loop around to land with a scoosh of bright white spume into the sea-loch. An ordinary morning, for me at least.

As the sun lifts higher and the cumulus resolves into cotton wool, I see the beech trees yellow into gold. The sky is stratus with high wind, but down here we are calm. It isn’t often like this. Mornings like these just beg to engage with us, beg us not to waste a single moment at the controlling end of a hoover because the birds are waiting for an audience, the puddles slack and dull and just longing for a jumping foot to cause exciting chaos. Do we ever think of that? Do we understand our own importance in the jungle of nature, that a path wants to be walked along, a sky craves our attention, a bird wants to be heard and not just by another bird?

I hear the stags roar across the hillsides, not visible to me but their voices are, that fight for dominance, for life itself. I hear the rally cars out there, the roar of them, the lights, the speed as they take the island roads by storm. I hear voices in the village shop, the words flying up from somewhere in between fresh veg and chilled goods, the lilt of a conversation, the murmur of loneliness from a single shopper reading his list out loud. Are you lonely? Are you alone? Two very different questions. I wish a rally driver the very best of luck tonight and he smiles as wide as a whole country. Thank you! he says. What number is your car? I ask, having heard it roar past my door, all throaty as an old whisky drinking rock singer, a few times over the past few days. It’s bright blue and covered in stickers and he, the driver, is young and full of spiritful life. I know nothing of him but I do know his smile and his response and that what I suddenly said meant something to him. We all need to be heard.

Before each rain shower, and there are always those, I watch the fall streaks, the virga , and I marvel. As they dance across the sea-loch like ethereal ghost dancers, I wonder how many people missed seeing them; on the way to work, dealing with recalcitrant children, caught up in the gazillion immediates of an ordinary life. It thinks me. If any didactic had ‘encouraged’ me to take time out, as a young mum, to really see, no, to REALLY see, the wonders of the great Out There, I would have whacked them in the chops. I would have screamed ‘ Can’t you see how impossible my life is right now!’ And that scream never deserved a question mark.

So, there is something about being older, about having the time and the head space to connect with something greater than myself. Another thing about being older is this, and I quote from Oscar Wilde, even though he says it with more drama than I might :-

‘The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old, but that one is young.’

And I say Amen to that.

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Island Blog – The Last to Leave the Dance Floor

Around my home the fragrance of Spring is an olfactory delight. Every room sings me daffodils. My garden sways with them and bunches arrive for my birthday. As I arrange them in vases, I consider their spacing with a view to the final picture, correcting myself from time to time. I never was a ‘shove-em-in’ sort of woman. I like presentation and flow, design and a sort of roundness that tells me I am probably OCD around the flower arranging thing. I might be thus around other things but that doesn’t fuss me now, even as it does think me about a book and its cover. Let me explain.

As I walk in the still cold wind, but not so cold as to beg a jacketty coverance, what I think I see is randomness, in the woods, along the banks, beside the shore, where various shrubs, trees and plants are exploding through the ground in a shout for life. Maybe ‘exploding’ is a bit ott. It is, to be honest, a more cautious peek out and no surprise there for the slice and dice artic wind is not gone yet back to wherever he takes his raggedy old destructive self as we welcome Mother Spring. His bite is one of anger and rage, of sudden ice, of ha ha and you thought you were safe to show your colours. Mean. But he can come in this month, oh hell yes, he can come and we must stand vigil, sniffing the weather and just knowing, as we once did before diesel fumes and light pollution turned us into eejits.

But I am wrong to think that anything in nature is random. It is anything but. I get that we randomise merrily away inside the confines of our garden, forcing intelligent plants to grow in all the wrong places, sentencing them to gigantic effortness that will never produce good blooms, but out there in the wild places, new life will explode into beauty and a future in which we have had no hand at all. I like that. So as I wander beneath some ancient larches that are pushing out buds I recognise their intelligence. Here is sheltered, both from strong wind and from ice wind. There, not so. Therefore the buds are still holding, holding, because a blast would ping them off into the nothing.

I notice my thoughts, about 200 thousand a minute. I watch fat trunks pass by, ancient and strong, moss covered, they who have stood for a hundred years. They may be bent and leaning somewhat, but I bet they are not fussed about how they look. They don’t bother with a mirror to tell them how wonkychops they are now. They don’t care for such nonsense. Their sole purpose is to stay alive through whatever ice slice dice weather comes their way. They are grounded but not trapped. And that thinks me. As we grow older, things will go wonkychops. They will. And, in knowing this, we have a choice. We can fuss and fret and btw get mildly histericous about turning 50, a year I uninhabited almost 20 years ago, or we can decide to dance whatever. My thoughts are all about my kids now and their kids. This is my world and what a world. It doesn’t matter how I look. They don’t care. It’s all about me showing up. Like the push for life in Spring.

And on we go, until we stop and, just fyi, I will be the last one to leave the dance floor.

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Island Blog – A body and a spirit

A body that has lived is a beautiful thing, not necessarily to behold, but it is beautiful nonetheless. Once, when it might have been beautiful to behold, I hid my own, never believing I could bare much of it to the world, or, to my small world of people. Even among my much younger (and fitter) sisters, I was cautious, making sure I had a dressing gown coveration when departing the shared bathroom or the shared bedroom. I was never shy, not that, but I had to be fully clothed to allow the ‘not shy’ in me to fly out into a room. I could do legs and loved mini skirts of the Mary Quant/ Carnaby Street era, but watched others bare cleavages and bellies and just knew I was way out of their league.

It didn’t matter, long term, much as nothing of vanity matters, long term. Eventually we get to realise that it is who we are to others that does last, that matters and sticks. Beautiful bare skin is nothing, after all, if the owner is a pain in the aspidistra, flaky, selfish, insincere. Now, to the body perfect. This body survives endless knocks and bumps, asks and denials, flak and cruelty and yet it works with a spirit to rise into another day, and another. And, the spirit is thankful it does and is ready at every point to help. Two parts of a whole, like an apple.

This body has adapted to endless demands, birthed children, kept itself awake throughout extreme exhaustion and still kept going. How did you do that? I ask, my spirit asks, because I could not have done this alone.

Well, says the body, you wanted me to and that is enough for me. I obey your command.

But what about the many times I didn’t care for you as you deserve?

I managed. I knew you loved me really. You were just distracted.

Yeah…..for decades. How is that ok?

It is as it is. Still is btw.

Even now, even now that I see the papery skin on my gnarled twiggy fingers? Even as I see you sink downwards? Even as you sometimes find it tricky to get out of bed without a grunt, or to lift from a chair, or when you are extremely cautious on hillsides? Even then?

Even then. We work together.

But when I am afraid of falling, of sickness, of living too long, of dying, are you?

No, I am always alert. I may obey your commands but I am way ahead of you when it comes to getting older, or more papery, more gnarled, more afraid of hillsides.

I think that reassures me. I think.

Listen, we have worked together for 68 years. Do you really think I am leaving now? Just look at what you have achieved, just look. You moved like a dancer through the demands and rejections, through the depressions and joys of an extraordinarily adventurous life. You held and nurtured five wonderful children. You lifted them into the world and set them free. You cried a lot. You doubted even more than a lot. And yet you, ditzy brain, crazy reckless dreamer, free spirit, risk taker, mistake maker, you stuck with me too. You didn’t, as I sometimes thought you might, head off the rails and into the wasteland. You are still here with me.

So I am. How wonderful, old body. Thank you.

You, my best friend, are so very welcome.

Shall we continue?