rise

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Island Blog – There’s Something About…..

Having no idea who reads my blogs, nor who benefits. Never knowing what each new day will bring, a serendipity or a catastrophe, a gain or a loss, a fall or that moment when I will stand tall as a warrior. It’s as if life lives me, and, in a strange way, I like that, most of the time. I like danger, living on the edge, always ready to do my very best at outwitting. I am naturally spontaneous, a state which can, and often has, found me in a dodgy situation, mudswamp rising up my legs, the dark completing me, eradication. Until, that is, my eyes adjusted. They did, and they do, and once the ‘ayes’ have it, the house is quietened, and then comes sensibility. Love that word. ‘The quality of being able to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences; sensitivity.’

There I am, was, appreciating and responding to my highest level, and although this life is bloody exhausting most of the time, what with all this learning even when I left school decades ago, I still love life, the way it lives me, the way I live it. Well, not so much the latter to be honest, because I can still flounder in mudswamp and the dark. However the importance of the important is simple. It’s poopy in the mud. I can do dark but not for long. I love light, am light, bring light. And there’s something in that, the need and the strength to defy. Any something is an enough something because we know the opposite of that.

I have no idea where my children are. I have no idea what will become of me, ditto when the next gale will smash down most of our island trees, nor whom will fall sick, nor when this baby will be born, nor when I will see this person rising from the sadness with a smile on her face. I know not whether this shrub or that will survive the winter, nor when I might hear the Arctic swans softly talking from across the sea-loch. I don’t know when a still day with all its quiet glory will come, not after a torrential rainday, the sea all a-popple with white smoke and sprachle. I never know and there’s something about that.

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Island Blog – The A Words, with a C or two

Apocrypha – are biblical or related writings not forming part of the accepted canon of scripture, some of which might be of doubtful authorship or authenticity. In Christianity, the word apocryphal was first applied to writings that were to be read privately rather than in the public context of church services. Interesting, that……….it calls to the rebel in me, just saying, and not just about bible wordings. It thinks me of any authoritative body writing rules and things and with a big power behind its butt. For me, for always in my life, this sort of sedentary, (smug) pronouncing sends my feet light and my flight inevitable because the such of this ‘such’ grew from the wrong place, a place of boardrooms and secrecy and nepotism. Not that I disagree with the latter, not if I am honest. I would give my children, and theirs, priority over others. It would be hard not to. If a friend is looking for a leg up (can you say that anymore?), I would be doing the lifting. We choose. All of us.

Acedia – Acedia has been variously defined as a state of listlessness or torpor, of not caring or not being concerned with one’s position or condition in the world. I get this, particularly in the face of the above. For me the list is long. Parents. Expectations. School/s. College. Society. Culture. Appearances. The Uninvited Role of a Female. History. Ages of Me (you can’t wear that…..you’re too old). And. More. We slide, or I did, into the abyss of many abysses yet to come. I doubted myself, the wild in me, the natural and curious me, the only one I really knew. Rising, politely, into either A, in clean knickers and with a rictus smile, I kept on trying to be the ‘who’ which was acceptable for the time, and the gathered mob. I confess to landing in the ludge of Acedia or Accidie. I like the words, even as I never liked the blob I allowed myself to become, the one who, when asked out, spent agonising times in front of my long mirror, one, I am certain, was one clearly out to inflate me. I allowed this. And, that statement is an important one. I know it now. There is no blame in my heart. However, I do allow that I did not know how to challenge the apocryphiles in my life. They stood a head taller than me, or so I thought, and thus they afeared me, big time.

I am different now, and the only thing I can do with this differentness is to spread it wide, like petals. I can tell my grandlings, mostly females, that they probably have to tow the history line, suck up the rules and regs, for a while, because, and I tell them this, their parents have experiential learning. They know their bruises, feel them still, remember the hard knocks, the shocks, the blocks. They also, and I did too, bring to the table their own fear results. Don’t go there, don’t say that, don’t risk this. T’is human. I try to bring a new intelligence into the mishmash of life. Pause, I suggest. Think, breathe, find a question without aggression in your mouth. What you have, and will always have is….

Choice and Control. Not over others, never that, but over yourself. You can go left when some apocryphal someone shouts Right! However, the learning which lifts accidie up and out of the abyss and into the light of a newness takes guts and intelligence and a very good ego control. Ego is useful but it’s the jester in the mix. I learned that too. I fell into the apathy of accidie often. It eats away at a soul, did mine. Jumbled thoughts, not my fault, I’m a victim, that dunk in the sludge. Perhaps it took me a whole lifetime to understand that I always had Choice. I always had Control. I didn’t believe it, too conditioned, too a product of another time, another culture, anotherness. Whatever.

I choose now. I control myself now. And, I have to say, admit, that I really wish I had done it sooner.

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Island Blog – We Can Too

There’s another hoolie blowing here, strafing the daffodils, splitting the petals into suncolours on a lewid grass. It isn’t really lewid, the grass, I just found the word and it would out. The grass is, in fact, growing strong and upwards, but only the latter bit when the hoodie pauses for breath. I swear we are all bent over these past months, the taller ones, like Jim and Archie are almost paperclipped. We work with the gales, that’s what we say, as we cheerfully take fifteen minutes to unfold from the driver seat and take another ten to straighten, pre entering the local shop. This bit is very important, because the paperclipped could well be in danger of leaving with all the wrong products, thus being unable to stick to their diet plan. A terrifying thought.

It thinks me, this wind, Kathleen or Jinx or Indigo or whatever is the sequential naming nonsense applied to ‘just another bloody gale’, which is what we called the whole damn lot of them when I was younger and when we believed in a world that talked straight, unencumbered by the ridonculous need to put everything into prettily labelled boxes. I sincerely believe we understood wildness, back then. I digress. My thinks, spiralling away from the whole gale-ness of things, make me consider disruption. As, indeed, a gale disrupts. But when something disrupts us, as humans, we respond in so many different ways. Some hide away, some rise in latent anger, some observe and consider, some run for higher ground. I’ve done them all. Trouble dropped into a community, a family, a couple, a crowd, dissents, if that’s a verb. It is now. If we can allow any respondents to respond in their own way, without judgement or, (or is it nor, Dad?) and we are not saints, not at all, but simple humans, then we have cracked it. I don’t say it is easy when challenges to said trouble comes thwack attack and feels personal. It hurts, until, if we have engaged in a lot of personal (and personally uncomfortable) inner work, such that teaches us about empathy and acceptance and humility, we just let go and listen. No, not just that, we actually hear, and grow.

Gales flail daffodils, tulips, anemones and narcissi. And, next Spring, they rise again. We can too.

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Island Blog – Dungarees and Cake

I know we are in the middle of a right frickin blast of an angry storm. The MET office is in a panic and everyone is warned of death. Although the catastrophising is ridiculous, I am very aware of how traumatic this storm, and all other storms, are for those in the crosshairs. There is no diminish in that. It must be horribly real for many. I know this, am aware of this, as I walk beneath bonkers trees, swiping at the sky as in an attempt to slice the wind and, thus, to cut it down into bite size pieces. I notice the limbs agrounded, bits of what once was a whole, lying scattered and looking up at me as I stomp by through the mudfast track. I’m sorry, I whisper to them, as my yellow boots lift over each one.

The night noise is frightening. Punching fists of muscled wind at my glass, I start, awaken, freeze and imagine. Settling, slowly, I bring in the narrative. I am safe, I am warm, I have four stone walls around me and the dark is not a threat. I lie back on my pillows, sip water, listen. Well that’s an error of judgement, because the shriek of that damn banshee is punishing my window vents into submission, forcing their little openings into a desperate whistling breath, and it sounds me like a caust of ghouls on the wild. I stop listening.

So, and tell me this. How is it that my thought in all this melee of ghastly, not for me as yet, but for so many others, is ‘Will I wear dungarees tomorrow at our library meet?’ I have no answer to that, once I have clocked the inappropriateness (good lord what a wordy word) of my thought. But, I am guessing, that most of us, faced with the face-sure of what is happening, and what will happen more so, and again so,tor and so and so and so, will twist home to the familiar. All of us, UK wide are in the shit of this. But, is it shit? That wonders me. Many may say yes, and do nothing about it. Many may say yes and find ways to work with what is happening to us all. Some will be lost beyond the beyond of it all. Some will surprise. 

It is happening people. Meantime, I am going to our library meet in dungarees and with cake.

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Island Blog – Shamshackle

Days slough on, canter on, dither on, as normal as it is for everyone else. Not one of us has the hold of the microphone on this, this takeshot of a life, moments, held, and held too long, or not long enough to learn the something of it all. . The past is whipping at our tails every second, and, as we all know, we do not see things the way they are, but see things as we are. Now that is one hec of a fricker, don’t you think? I think I see the truth and the one beside me, although he isn’t anymore, would turn his head up to me, his eyes astonished, and wag his head. I wasn’t there that day, he said. He was, but only in my story. How in the helikinns are people able to stay together for decades? I have no answer to that. I did. He did. But I am not sure either of us wanted that. It just kind of worked. We were tired, fricked and tricked out, beyond the the beyond of ourselves, as if there was only the Edge left to either of us, and there was no option there. We had frolicked and bolloxed our way through a million miles of forever, sagging together, furious together, lost together, shamshackled. 

I keep walking each day. I keep the rules, my rules, the tidy, the hoover out, now and then, the dust a blow in my mouth and the wheech of it laughs me as it just lands somewhere else. Prettier now, I tell it. I approve. A shift shape is always a mighty thing. I miss the Poppy dog. She was not mine at first, under the ownership of the captain of all ships, including hers, and mine. He was divolute with his training, absent, actually, but when he dived into the earth, heading down into the bowels of the whole thing, I took her on. Don’t be telling me that old dogs can’t learn new tricks because that is a load of horse. She learned, no treats on begging. No begging. No sandwich crusts of a lunchtime. No paw up will soften this mother heart, jeez, have I not know this begging thing and not just from dogs in my dithering life?

But, I confess, I loved her. I still do, and just thinking of her out there under the freeze of winter, coming home to the nothing, of the without her, rises the lump in my throat, my eyes looking for her jounce at the window, her bounce around my feet, every single time.  The way she dashed miles through the home, up and down the stairs, a toy in her mouth, her skids flipping the stairs into slide, so fast she was, her arse bumping against a wall when the curve confounded her.  Was. Not a great word, Not about her. Thinks me about other wases. Not sure there is a plural available just yet. There will be one day. We have new young writers and a serious need to blow the dust of the Oxford Dictionary. Another Shamshackle.

Seeing things as we see, or saw them, is how it is. But, and there’s a butt there. Moving on is never easy. not for nobody. Notwithstanding, if we refuse to move, we will be left behind. I can feel it, hear it, see it all around me, us. The shamshackle of it all. It is a sham and a shackle. Not for me. I am old, I know this, but the fightlight is wild in me and strong and I am hoping it is wild in you too. I think life is not the dream we imagined, but better, because whatever we go through, whatever we face down, sham out, shackle out, we can rise, torn, yes, broken, dirty, but still with the rising in us. 

Tomorrow is the Monday of it all, the ghastly wotwot of having to shiftshape into a someone else. For school, for a job, for the weather, for new clothing, a new identity. You know yourselves. You see and know what you see and know. Be clear on that. It might be a shackle, but it is not a sham.

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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 – Drunken Cakes and Rising

Today I didn’t bake a cake. It was time to take a day off and besides, I had no butter in the fridge. Recently I have been baking in those early hours when even the blackbirds are still asleep out there, up in the safety of tree foliage. The idea came to me one dawn as if someone spoke the word. Bake. But, I said, fighting my way out from beneath a twisted duvet, I loathe baking, don’t you remember? All that flaming baking palaverance at Tapselteerie, when guests expected tea and cake after a day out and me in the kitchen facing yet another flatpack frisbee, burned at the edges and refusing to rise to the occasion? Remember that? And I never got better at it, not in 15 years. That’s because you refused to follow a recipe, she snorts. So? I hate following anything or anyone.

Bake, she says again and I watch the bee words fly about the room, hear them laughing. I get up to flap them away but they are too fast for my morning flaps. They follow me down the stairs and perch, one on each shoulder. Bake, bake they say again, tweaking my ear lobes before lifting like bluebottles into the air. Well dammit! Alright, alright I will bake but the idea is ridiculous because I don’t eat cake and rarely have done so throughout my long and cakeless life, and the only time I did was because it was someone’s birthday. I breakfast and perform a few mindless chores, mindlessly.

This is my point, says Bake Voice. Mindless tasks are not enough for you, not these long solo days. Not any more. It is time to push away the walls of your comfort zone, to reach beyond your beliefs that you have no point, you are done, might as well sit and brood thing. If you bake, they will come. Who will come? I feel defensive. I don’t want any ‘comings’ thank you very much. I am just fine on my own, fine without cake. Bake Voice is quiet for a bit and just as I’m thinking she has gone to harry another poor cake-disliking soul, she says this. Give the cake away. Now that peaks my interest because I am a giving-away sort of woman who takes great pleasure in the process. Who to, I begin to wonder, and how much to who to? I hear Bake Voice chuckle. She knows she’s got me.

Stocking up with stork and butter, icing sugar, jam, castor sugar, flour and soft fruit, I lightly baste a deep cake tin and flip on the oven to 160 fan. This cake will rise I tell the line-up of ingredients, wagging my finger. You will rise. Nobody responds which I consider a good student reaction. They are subdued and obedient. I haul out the big mixer and affix the whirly thing although it takes me a few minutes to remember how to, and set the process in motion. Apple Cake today, I decide and I slice up dessert apples, pouring a hefty tablespoon of artisan chocolate rum over the pieces to marinade. Assembled and smelling divine, I feel a little tipsy at 5 am which is something I haven’t felt since I was a teenager. I smile, pour the mix into the cake tin and slide it into the oven. Although I have made this recipe up, I do know that a deep cake full of drunken apple slices will be a slow cook. 45 minutes should do it.

Although I can barely believe it, the cake rises and remains risen, its top warmly golden, its centre cooked through according to the clean tip of an inserted skewer. I leave it to cool a while in the tin then turn it onto a wire rack. I am excited and very proud. Share your pride with me, says Bake Voice from the other side of the kitchen and I drop her a deferential curtsey. Later, once cooled, I split the deep cake and fill with jam, sliced strawberries and butter cream icing. I take a photo, just to prove I have evolved from my frisbee period. My neighbours are delighted. So are the local shopkeepers, passing strangers, the chimney sweep, the plumber and the gardener. Some of them are going on a diet. Each morning I bake. Lime cake with gin and blueberries; Raspberry sponge with strawberry jam, lemon zest and plum brandy. Yes, it sounds confused yet it still rises into a moist and delicious Not-Frisbee. Each recipe is made up, magically. None of them should work, let alone rise, but they all do. I am obviously a gifted cake genius.

It isn’t magic, says Bake Voice, startling me from where I sit watching the birds flit and flut among the feeders. What? I say. It isn’t magic, she repeats and you’re no genius. It’s me guiding you. If life had been left up to you, it would be same old same old. I got you off your butt and into elevated thinking. I un-dulled your mind. I smile. She’s right. I have felt excited and curious each day as my thoughts dance through an unlikely list of ingredients, turning them into gifts that bring happy smiles to cake-loving faces. So, Smartarse, I round on her, when I have run out of friends because they all weigh 28 stone and hide when they see me coming, what then?

Oh, she grins, don’t worry, I’ll come up with another idea. Trust me.

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Island Blog – Intelligent Adaptation

I walk this day around the shore of the sea-loch as the tide ebbs and fast as if there’s a great ocean sucker fish drinking deep. I watch the water startled, yanked backwards by some fierce mother as it is whipped back through the narrows, rock-squashed into a skinny rip tide. It thinks me of my grand girls when Mother decides on plaits and will not allow any escape from said plaiting.

I chat with the trees, the track, the sunlight and even the damn flies having been away for a marvellous four days during which I boarded a ferry, drove over 200 miles and spent 3 nights with my daughter and her family for the first time in too many years; when I left my island home alone, knowing she was empty of life until I returned (first time); when I found my inner brave and launched out into open ocean, as me, as one, as singular, as a widow, as me. Although I knew that it would be more than ok, that I would encounter only k9ndness, the thought of going any further than island rocks scared me. But and but again, no buts, no butts. On the ferry, good lord the slowest and smallest Calmac ferry ever, I sat with poppy dog on my lap and longed to turn back home. Called back to my little Pixty car waiting for me in the bowels of the boat I am safe again. I drive out through the open metal maw and my journey begins. I know it well but haven’t driven it long longtime. My fears? traffic. people. that’s all. (all lower case).

The stay was wonderful. I remembered easily the activity in this home, the go here now, the go there now, thing. We did it all. We checked horses in fields, walked dogs, skirted rivers, watched butterflies, played word games, cooked food, laughed, engaged in private moments, slept and went again. When I left I reflected on it all, the whole colour wheel in captured glances at how it was, that singular catch, the legacy of it. I drove back at my own speed. I am not slow but I’m not fast neither, or is it either? And this this thinks me into intelligent adaptation. Maybe a big jump but stay with me. I have 3 hours for thinks.

In my sudden (for death is always sudden, no matter how expected) widowhood, I find an identity. Initially I was a puddle. For a long time. Now, not. I want to be known as me, unpuddled and rising into a lift of wild water, connectable with the rain that falls from the great Up There. I never knew me. I never was me. I was daughter and then wife. ‘Me’ was for decades irrelevant and unremarkable, as if she didn’t deserve noticing much beyond her physical presence. And, although I have made many adaptations over time I didn’t really know my way through it and, to be honest, I am glad I didn’t. It would have caused fire without available extinguishers. Instead I just kept moving on, learning, adapting and repeat. But now, now that when I go away I come back to just-the-way-I-left-it; when I can go out without saying anything at all; when I can plan new encounters, new commitments, new anything, I feel a quandary of contradictions. I know the old way but that way is dead now whereas I live on inside this loneliness, this freedom, this nothing, this everything, this, this, this.

How to work with the hoo-ha of such contradictions? Intelligent Adaptation. That’s how. Oh, I sound so smart but I am not smart at all, not on this lonely road, not on any road. But I have learned that it is eminently possible to move on from circumstances and situations only if a human wants to. In my journey, particularly through the older years, I find myself the moving on person. It saddens me because I know that there are wonderful people stuck inside the dead past, unable, unwilling to accept the new. Not me. Don’t let it be you. Isn’t this intelligent adaptation? What I went through is peanuts to many. I don’t need to say anything because, and this matters, I found someone professional to talk things out. Private. Secure. My regrets, my pain, my fear, all of it conversationed in the right place; thus I can walk towards the village, watching eagles fly pre buying broccoli et la la, tossing my Hallo into the day, knowing that my very private angst is in safe hands.

I called my bank today. I was welcomed with Hallo Mrs Fairbairns. It jarred me. I am not Mrs anymore and never will be. Many thinks around that one. I think about intelligent adaptation and I know that I can adapt and then rise into the me of me. However, the online thing requires a title. Mrs, Miss, Ms. No. Captain, Brigadier, Princess…… No. Each one of those titles sound like ownership. I was Mrs. I am no longer. Titles bother me, labels confound. It’s probably my issue but I doubt this affects only me. Being boxed, labelled, leaves many of us on lonely streets, wandering, wondering who we are now and where we might choose to belong or to whom. And the wandering is of import because it is not possible to adapt to a whole new life in the wake of the old and familiar one. I might feel lost at times, probably will, over and over, but I am finding my way. My Way. I won’t inwardly growl at being labelled as Mrs because I know the title to be one of respect. I also know that our language is archaic in such an area as this. I want my first name and then my second. But, wait. My second name is now my married name, which is not my name but a gift from the rule book of Traditional Marriagitis. So I continue wandering, the conundrums flitting about me like swallows. Whether or not a definite answer comes, it doesn’t really matter because I am building the new me from the inside out, using intelligent adaptation as my thought and reasoning process.

If all this sounds confusing, it is. Even to me.

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Island Blog – Farrago, A Walk, A Widow

I feel like I am walking backwards in terra incognita. I might thwack into Rara Avis, a hippogriff, a chimera, a story I cannot read, nor understand. I recall walking backwards into a lamppost once, and it hurt. My head spun a whole web leaving me feeling foolish and a little sick. It’s not so different now what with the re-run of Covid restrictions. We could move Christmas to June, I suppose, when the days are balmy and warm and quite unacceptable for the virus. Even my thisitive ponking is hiding in the attic and the windmills of my mind are moving too slow to grind the corn. Everything is so very confusing. But it’s not just that. It’s the longness of it all, the slogging grind of endlessment and with no wide horizon out there as a promissory note.

As I bounce into each morning, which I do, I meet the morning, usually half way down the stairs, in the place where Winnie the Pooh stops to think, or gets dropped by Christopher Robin. I never worked out which. The morning is most gracious, meeting and greeting me like this. It must be so much more rested in normal homes where folk rise with the light in a big fat panic because they can’t find their cufflinks or their art homework or their gym shoes. In this house the morning is never a panic, not any more, even if I do recall a few in my past life. What are you thinking? asks the morning as we meet in a socially distanced greeting. Oh, I reply, shucking off the dreams and turning to watch them scoot back up to the bedroom where they will plan another show for tonight….mostly Covid worries. Ah, yes. Of course. Well, you know you have to make your own decisions about what you do within a farrago. I nod. Coffee, I say, heading for the kettle which is also getting used to being woken early. I pass a lodger, hanging from her web, and I greet her. She isn’t fussed at my looking. She knows I won’t hurt her. I only swipe at the old webs, blackened by fire dust and long abandoned.

I walk with a friend and her dog. We plash through the puddles, noticing and commenting on the way the island sucks up any amount of rain, allowing it fraccess to slip-aways and into burns and water scurries, all finding the sea eventually. We will never sink, not this rock, not these island people with their stout boots and heart-strong spirits. We talk of life, of Christmas hopes, of Covid fears, of how we have managed to refuse defeat, even if we sometimes dip our heads into our hands and feel like nomads without any physical ground to traverse. It is all happening within our minds, the doubts, the confusion, the halter that tightens daily. And here we have control, as long as we exert that control. But, but and but, I twitter at her, I just don’t know what to do, what to decide. I, in theory, have family coming. I am longing for them. I don’t want to stop them. I would like to be a woman who is easy with the vast expanse of life but I am also engaged fully with the minutiae of life. Of course I flaming am! I was a wife, am a mother and grandmother and I learned quickquick that this was my role. If life had been down to himself, the whole scatterment of children would have spent their lives in the trees or floating out to sea in inappropriate boats. They would never have washed nor cleaned behind their ears. Their diet would have been white sliced bread and a fry-up, three times a day. Good Lord, of course I was all about the minutiae. However, this learned behaviour trips me up nowadays, particularly in these nowadays, inside this farrago, this dissolution of life as we knew it.

It wonders me. What, if (let’s play) I had become a widow in ordinary times, those times when we could go anywhere, see anyone, travel freely, guffaw around tables sharing breaths? Gosh, it might have been so much easier to walk a widow’s way. Maybe she would have found herself a bit quicker. Maybe after all that fannying about with minutiae, she might have pulled on her dancing shoes and spun around lampposts, spun new webs, spun just for the fun of it. Maybe. Ah, but I am open to learning, no matter the times. Perhaps these tougher times will find us stronger, more autonomous, more ready to outgo when outgoing is once more the normal. Farragos, in my experience, lose momentum and fade away eventually. Now why is that?

The human spirit is why. We are, let’s be honest, indestructible.

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Island Blog – Watching, Waiting, Wondering

The morning begins well in that I wake up and it’s morning, well almost, still dark but the clock tells me of others who rise at this hour, dark or no dark. I slip into my dressing gown, thank my bed, pat the dog and glide down the stairs. I remember actually doing that once, for a dare of course, on a tin tray and an oak stair case that dog-legged into the room. Not a good plan. I started off well, gathered warp speed and just knew I was about to be sliced like an egg when I hit the sharp corner, all balustrades and newel posts and rigid as if it had rooted into the earth’s core. The wails arose in me, alerting all inmates who were quietly sipping Earl Grey from china cups and pretending they didn’t want another scone. My mama was livid even if she feigned compassion. I could see it in the slit of her mouth, the narrowing of her eyes as she scooped me up and marched me away, my knees bleeding, my face scratched and my mouth yelling out a storm. This morning’s glide was more gentle, my hands holding both bannisters and my cautious eyes wide open for the fall that always threatens old folk, the one that leaps out for a rugby tackle from somewhere in my blind spot.

I descend in regal safety and round the corner for coffee and a peer into the darkness. No moon, but she is coming, the Beaver Moon, tomorrow I believe, although why the moon has to keep to a schedule un-moons me somewhat. I had thought her above such calendar control. I perceive her as reckless, upskittling, wild, and that’s because her full bellied lightshow creates that reaction in most women I know and some men too. I tap tap wait for the light to rise. I iron something, sweep another thing, flip through Facebook, write some notes about what I will do with my day, this day, today, most of which will be scratched out by breakfast once I realise that the ladder to any of them has faulty rungs, most of them missing.

I WhatsApp chat with my best friend and she laughs me and we share all our familial concerns and delights. We have done this for years now and her face takes me right back to her, the way she waggles her head when telling me of something that pains or puzzles her, the way she looks straight at me when she asks how I am. I know why. When I say ‘Fine’ she smirks and challenges, but I will always say ‘Fine’ because mostly, I am just that. However, as the day rolls on, not like chocolate, more like a stubble field and with me barefoot, I am ratty with the dog. It shocks me for I am only occasionally ratty and I don’t like it in me at all. I watch the wind, hear the roar of the whips and twisting punches of it, see it scrape rain across my window and bend the trees like torture, laughing at its bully power. Reluctantly I decide to walk, no matter the rain, the bully punching wind, the darkling grey, the wet underfoot.

To begin with, I stomp. I know I am stomping and the track looks up at me, eyebrows raised. I pause and smile and slow my boots. Then, as I rise into the woods, the rise of the track lifting me from my earthly grump, I begin to see, to notice, to watch. The bare limbs stick out like old fingers, old friends, the ancients who still stay to protect and to remind. Leaves still holding on, copper, gold and blood, tremble in the wind, showing me this face, then that. I hear the tic-a-tic-a-tic of their dance and I stop to watch. Beneath my skinny soled boots, a bronze carpet tongues out before me, inviting. The wind lifts again and the pines sing as the wind combs the needles, the ones that don’t ever give up, the ones I will see all winter long. A stand of ditchwater has been claimed by water moss and I chuckle at the emerald courage of this survivor. Well done you, I say, as I pause to wonder and I swear it shimmies. Tree ferns waggle like random hair tufts all the way up an alder tree, flapping at me as I meander beneath the high stretch of ancient trunk. Geese navigate the sky wind adjusting their positions and I wonder again at their understanding of all this power and of my complete lack.

I will never understand the power of watching, waiting and wondering, will even thwack it away with an irritable flap, but once I step out into it, bring myself to walk, to stand as a part of it, engaged with it, no distractions from it, I return with hope. Where the hell I found that hope, I can not answer, but it doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that in my reclusive sadness there is a beckoning, one irritating enough to get me inside my boots and out there.