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Island Blog – My Fabulous Friend

I fly round the switchbacks on my way to the harbour town. I do. Fly. Oneson suggested, only the once mind, that I might consider a more ‘sedate’ model of automobile. Only once. I snorted but it made me reconsider my nomorethan40 thing when traversing the skinny island roads, what with their potholes and that falling off edge, depth at least 7 inches at certain points, enough to take the belly out of a sassy mini cooper. I know how to drive. I taught my kids to DRIVE round corners, none of this hesitating and going into dipfh lock, or whatever it’s called. It’s just a hill, after all. You may see only sky for a few yards but there’s a beauty in that. Sun in your face? Enjoy it. Your biggest problem will be with the visitors who won’t let you pass, no matter the light flashing and the hooting and the almost landing inside their boot. I digress.

I used to think those 10 miles a real travail. A dull and necessary pain in the arse, but not now. Not now that I am free to go wherever I like, and whenever. I am meeting a dear friend for lunch, a strong woman, a fighter, with guts of steel and the light of a rainbow in her every move. We have history, naughty times, fun memories, shared pains and joys. We meet at the top of town, where, to which, I have flown, and take our seats in a huge conservatory overlooking the harbour. There are new owners now and the place has had a facelift and a half. Jazz and blues play from the speakers and the sun shines in like a beacon. This beautiful hoist of granite was a naval lookout base in the war years, when I very much doubt it looked as good as this. We immediately connect, my friend and I and are laughing within minutes. We are 25 again, the world our oyster, none of the ensuing troubles in our minds, none of the pain or sickness, none of the losses, no guilt, no olding fears. She became the voice for the island’s young people, the lost and abused. She did more for this island than can be imagined. We talked on this. I said ‘I could never have done what you did, what you do, don’t have the head for it.’ After 2 wonderful hours, we said farewell for now. We will meet up again, been too long, covid and dementia and death and la la la tiddleypom. All that olding shite. Her eyes are bright, her face as beautiful as it always was, her spirit strong and feisty.

Home again, I walk the fluffy dog who (or is it which?) will be a baldicoot tomorrow after a wash, cut and blow dry with Heather, and a load cooler and with that dark stripe down her spine as if she was a tiger, once. I wander beneath the louring trees, heavy now in a way I see as tired. We are tired of this heavy leaf cover summer thing. Look at the bracken all flopping and brown and can we go that way please? But, much as I am loving the surprise, the sun, the strange late weather, it is holding them in stasis, requiring more leafness and more standing up and wotwot. I remember, in Tapselteerie days, feeling just like that. I am so, so tired of holding up my leaves, husband, children, guests, visitors and even though I smelled autumn on the morning breeze, it’s as if summer is refusing to ungrip her grip. I tell the trees this, and they remember. I will have said the same thing to them all those years ago, and, bless them, they absorbed it and probably waved at me in recognition. We feel the same, they said.

Much like my fabulous olding friend today.

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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 – Ripples, Dementia and New Land

Two and a half years after ten as a dementia carer, the ripples continue, spreading out as if no land is there to stop them. Where is the land, the beginning, the stop point and also the start? Who knows when, after all those years of confusion, of accommodating the one with dementia, of twisting into knots in order to make things as okay as possible, landfall is an option? And, what land will be there? A strange new one, one that will require the carer to find her or himself? Yes a strange land because this carer is forever changed. Just untangling the knots will take years and then it is not so much a finding of who I was before, but more of building a new me, one I don’t know at all, not yet.

I have just listened to ‘Travellers to Unimaginable Lands’ by Dasha Kiper on Radio 4, a series on dementia and caring and so intelligently put together as to explain the dichotomies, confusion, anger, demands and lack of understanding as to affirm exactly what I and other carers go through. The one with dementia becomes more of what he or she always was. Correct. People ask ‘How is he, or she?’ until we, the carer, grow weary of answering whilst feeling even more lonely and isolated than before. Rarely, oh rarely, does anyone ask ‘How are you?’ Why is this? Because, I believe, there is far too much still unknown about dementia and the devastating and long term damage to the carer; because a long term sickness is something to be compartmentalised, understood and run away from. It is messy and uncomfortable and what we want to see is a bright, capable, carer who doesn’t complain or fall apart. We want to hear about the good moments, hold onto them and even, in our kindly ignorance, encourage the falling apart carer to focus on those times. We don’t want to know about the details, the nightly horrors, the extreme lack of sleep, the anger, frustration and fear. We cannot process it, we just cannot. Please, their eyes tell me, keep this light. I’m just here to bring honey, flowers, a card perhaps have a quick coffee but I must get back to my own life. And there you have it, there I had it, there all carers have it. And somehow we cannot let our feelings out for fear of seeming weak and failing. So, we don’t.

The series, however, investigates and illuminates the feelings a carer will feel. Sometimes, the longing for it to end, swiftly followed by a tsunami of guilt. Sometimes the desire to hurt, to punish, to argue and shout. Sometimes the wonderful warmth that appears as randomly as the accusations, of an old companionship, a shared long-term agreement on what music we like, what stories, what memories we share. A glimpse of what was, the longing for it to stay a while, fingers clutching as it recedes or snaps shut like teeth, gone, forgotten, denied. The ensuing sadness, the rise from a chair I only just sat down in, my smile eager, say more, say a bit more, yes we did do that, share that, enjoy that together, then a lonely wander into another room as he clamped on his headphones and goes back to Casualty, something he would have mocked when he was the man I knew.

I am thankful for this series because although it was tough in parts to re-live those long years, its existence means that carers, unpaid or paid, just might find the support they need. Dementia is cruel and endless, or so it seems. As the person with dementia moves into unimaginable lands, they don’t go in a linear way, one we can understand and process. There are no uniform stages, nothing we can expect nor prepare for. As the sufferer’s unreality settles as reality in a damaged brain, there is no conversational flow, no logic, nothing to grasp onto. A carer lives reactively and that is upsetting, confusing and exhausting. Nothing agreed ten minutes ago is a truth, because a new ‘truth’ may appear, changing everything. And so the carer must accept this or fall apart. There is no opportunity for discussion, no way to remind a damaged brain of what was agreed, a trip to the shop, a cafe, a doctor’s appointment, because in his mind, that decision is my delusion, something I made up and never communicated to him. You always were flighty, fey, in another world!, making things up. A derisive snort, a turn away, and I must accept this without recourse to my own frustration, without expelling a fruitless vomit that would only make a mess, one I would have to clear up. To disagree is to bring on a 8 part series of accusations, rejections, sulks and criticisms, and all carefully, or so it seems, targeting my most vulnerable inner weaknesses, and poking at them all. He doesn’t mean to hurt, I tell myself, whilst I try to calm the feelings of rejection and the sting of dismissal, whilst I recall he could often behave this way as a healthy man. And, as he lights up like a Christmas tree when someone he is fond of comes to chat with him, the loneliness is crippling.

So, I say, Hallelujah to this new understanding of how a carer feels. Hallelujah to the freedom that understanding and exposure brings. To shine a light on we who care or cared just might nurture us as we work through the chaos and the years, because it would mean we no longer need to pretend everything is marvellous when in truth our whole world is crumbling. It also might mean that we can find new land once the story comes to an end knowing we gave our very best, our falls from grace understandable, our sacrifice a gift, not only to the sufferer, but to ourselves. And, when we are no longer all at sea, we can swim with the ripples until a new land makes them stop. We can climb out, ragged and torn whilst knowing who we just might be able to become, curious, broken and beautifully lost. I got through it, I did, and, both despite and because of the memories, I am proud of that.

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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.

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Island Blog – A Tundra Meet Without

Talking with an old friend today, I found my thinks coming into my mouth in words. It’s interesting how, when this happens, words can jumble like something as yet un-sorted through, like a crowd in disarray and in need of leadership and organisation, like kids in an unsupervised playground at break time. In both of these, the dominant factor is escape from a confined space. In the first, a big poly-bag, in the second the limitation of a desk, the well-breathed air of a morning’s lessons and the four walls that surround. It’s the same with the release of words after long hours of nobody to speak with beyond Myself (and she is always lurking) the dog, the geraniums and the disinterest of Radio 2.

My friend says something about her own loss and bereavement and there’s a tidal wave rising in my throat. I can feel it and I swallow down, mostly to no avail. I can blurt. The very best of us can blurt after all even as we may pretend we absolutely never do. It isn’t that I want to fix my friend, not at all. How can I ever know, no matter how much she tells me how life is for her, understand fully a sadness I cannot imagine? This applies to anyone I meet. We are all unique, in joys, in pain, in experience, in a zillion other ways. But the impulsive desire to connect on common ground is only human. If I care, I care, but my words need leadership. I am not a helmsman, nor helmswoman , nor helmsperson or whatever title is now socially acceptable. I am an excellent crew, Himself told me this oftentimes and he liked having an excellent crew for a wife. In fact, he liked it so much that I was never taught to helm at all. Funny, though, I do remember basking in the glory of being a First Mate as if the glass ceiling didn’t bother me one bit. I think differently now. I digress…….

I know I am more distant than my friend in terms of the death bit and by many months. I also know that I am planets away from her experience. But the grief we share, the common ground, is still tundra for us both and here we can meet. We fill in time, we tell each other. We do a little thing and then another little thing after the first little thing as we crawl our way through the days Without. And here we can help each other. We can laugh together about the extraordinary and astonishing things our friends say with good and loving intent. ‘Are you ‘there’ yet?’ ‘You should get out more, dress up, volunteer…’ All questions and suggestions are kindly meant, we who are crawling through the tundra, know this. But we can be lonely out there. We didn’t know we were going there at all but here we are, stumbling over the rocks of guilt and regret, passed the cacti of lost opportunities seen through the sharp looking eyes of hindsight. We trip over raised issues unresolved for ever. We shiver in the ice-winds of anger and burn in the sandstorms of confusion. We long for butterflies and an oasis of shade, the promise of an end to this timeless wandering only to find yet another mirage that shimmers and shivers into another day of the same.

And we laugh as we eat our lunch in the island sunshine. We sip our coffee and erupt into nonsense as our eyes connect and sparkle. We remind each other that, before this, we were girls, wild girls, brimming with hope and trust and now, now, in this swathe of tundra, we know we want to find that spirit once again. We take a wander around the island charity shop, laughing about what neither of us can wear again, but how we did once, oh we did once. And we part. I drive home left and she goes right. I know that both of us have been lifted this day. We found an oasis and it was no mirage. Although we both return to filling in the hours, we will remember each other and we will smile. We will both have learned a new something, a new way to look at an old thing and this, I believe is what life really offers each one of us. It is no easy ride for anyone. Not anyone, but the anyones who decide to be open, looking out, honest about how they feel and best of all, courageous enough to ask for help, well, they, we, have the best chance of moving onward. Not to forget, no. But, instead to learn to live on Without. There will always be a missing, no matter the relief initially felt (in my case) at the death. There will be months, years of just getting through each day, but one day, one day, waking up will feel good and the day ahead will be full of promise. I know it.

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Island Blog – On Golden

This day it is warmer, even warm. I awaken into the morning, light already, the wind light and the sky bright. No flat grey this morning and no cold wind and I am thankful. It has felt for a while now that this island stuck out into the great Atlantic has been the fulcrum for conflict, as if Summer and what we expect clashes with Autumn and what we don’t expect, and in June. Even the sea is a restless woman, plucking at her coverlets when opposing currents and wind patterns argue loudly with the tide cycles. Tide over wind, wind over tide, it’s exhausting and I am mighty glad not to be out there on a boat.

Today would have been our 50th wedding anniversary. I am not at all sentimental but I cannot say I haven’t given it a thought. Quite the opposite. In fact, I choose to think and a lot as I look back down the years of anniversaries and of 365 days in between each of them. So many and over such a long time, a time of growing children, of laughing and crying, of loving and hating, of warm easy peace and big storms, of wind over tide and tide over wind and repeat. Not many marriages make such an arrival into the harbour but we would have done, had he lived. In a traditional type marriage there is, or was, a lot of old fashioned claptrap, a lot of He is the Man of the House and She is the Little Woman who cooks and cleans and I can tell you I yelled and rebelled a great deal, but somehow we stayed where we were and where we were was together. This sunshine day I remember him as he was way back when romance was still alive and the pressures of adjusting to change flicked the feet out from under us. I sometimes wonder, now that I have time to engage with the wondering thingy, why it was so hard for him as an older man to accept change between us. I remember him questioning once, Why on earth would I want to do that? when I suggested that we both might consider this change. After all, wasn’t I fleet of foot and fancy free until my first son was born? I knew I had changed, of course I had. However this man who could accept all the vagaries of a capricious ocean found it very hard to accept any such in me, even as I knew I was 90% ocean.

But here I am alone now and remembering. I remember the times he surprised me with dinner plans, with roses and thoughtfulness. Romance was never dead in him. He just found me impossible and I know I was. The last anniversary card he gave me on this day in 2020, the year he died, he wrote in a very wobbly scribble ‘You know I have always loved you.’ I recall a mental snort, one I am not proud of, one I didn’t show. Instead I bent to kiss him on his withered cheek and smiled. We did ok, I said.

Happy Golden my husband.

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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.

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Island Blog – Grief, Music and Cooking

I miss him. It’s like I am forgetting the last ten years of caring and remembering the before times, the good times. I wake at 2 am, cold, and turn to borrow his warmth. It really shakes me at first until I remember where his body now lies, in the frozen ground. I feel the warmth of his hand in mine, that I Am Safe Now feeling. I never slept well, unlike him but he always woke enough to calm whatever storm was going on inside me. I miss him. I wish I had told him he was my everything but I did not. The way we changed, the children who came and whose needs became our modus operandi and our division bell, the way life upped and downed us, all stopped my mouth. Why didn’t I say it? I just don’t know. My deep need for independence was of such importance to me that I forgot to remember the basics. Ah, regrets! All I can do now is to talk to him as I move alone through my days. I am thankful for the rise of good memories even as they do not come without guilt and regret. This is grieving.

Downstairs I flip on the radio. The Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics. A tad cruel. I think back on Mike, Angie and their two sons in our big kitchen at Tapselteerie. We are sharing tea and cake and Mike is telling my kids, whose eyes are on stalks before this celebrity visitor, that he had never had a guitar lesson in his life, that he taught himself in his bedroom. It is just what they needed to hear. it doesn’t matter how you develop your passion, he says, just as long as you do develop it. Remember that. When I look at my five children now, as adults, passionate about their work and with barely a qualification between them, I know they took Mike’s words to heart.

I empty the fridge drawers of veg. Onion, garlic, butternut squash, sun-dried tomatoes, apple, ginger, lime, red pepper, leek and kalamata olives. Add honey, balsamic vinegar, tinned tomatoes, white wine, herbs and seasoning. It simmers now on the range and will last me days. I always cook for a platoon. Old habits die hard. I make a flavoured olive oil (extra virgin) mix and pour it into one of those sealable jars. I soak more sun-dried tomatoes for a little, chop them and add them to the oil mix, for later, for lunch perhaps, in a tortilla wrap, not that I have ever worked out how to fold those damn things effectively. I always need a shower after a tortilla wrap. The music plays on.

Poppy dog comes downstairs. She doesn’t mind that it is still night time for most people; she just works with my wakefulness and if I am up then it must be breakfast time. I boot her out into minus 2 degrees for a quick pee and prepare her food. Dried kibble topped with raw carrot slices and a few bits of chopped chicken to draw her in. Kibble, after all, is a bit dull on its own. I order a small extending lead for our daily walks for she is going deaf and no longer hears my callback should we meet another dog. Although she is all bark and no bite, or all fur coat and no nickers, it can alarm folk, the noise and the rush of her. I think of how it is these days without tourists and of how all that will change when they return to walk around Tapselteerie, to lose themselves inside her wild beauty. We islanders have enjoyed a year now of peaceful bliss even as we need visitors and their cash. One side of the coin and the other. It thinks me.

Ten years of caring and I am glad it is over. 49 years of marriage and I miss him. How tricky it is to find perspective in those two opposing thoughts. How fine it will be when I do. When he was declining, I became practical and cool. I stayed that way right up to his dying. Perhaps I became what was necessary and productive for the times but now, as I begin to soften, I have regrets. Can anyone hold balance when facing the appalling horrors of dementia? Perhaps not. One day I will write on this, but not yet. My inner writer tells me there are many miles to go yet. Many miles too, till morning.

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Island Blog – Inside Out

My washing machine, which, by the way, has behaved normally for a long time, has suddenly begun to turn clothes, bedding and other things, inside out during each wash. At first it annoyed me. What do you think you’re doing? I asked it. I mean, you have washed things as I rendered them into your maw for, oh, years now, and all of a sudden, without consulting me, you turn things about. Yes, I know that most goodly women wash everything inside out. We are advised to do this. It says so on the label. But I never read labels and there was a frisson of excitement that arose in my goodly breast as I pushed everything in with the outside on the outside. I love to break the rules anyway.

As I fight with a huge cotton/linen duvet cover that is half inside out and half outside in, I have some thinks. Going deeper, I wonder if the Universal Mother Protector is trying to tell me something. What could that be? Is she advising me that, before it is too late, I begin at the age of 67, with a hec of a lot of washing years under my belt, to obey the rules? Surely it can’t be that. This bedding, these jeans and tops, frocks and socks have managed with my disobedience for as long as I can remember and nothing has fallen apart. Well, not many things, anyway.

Then I walk my thinks into other areas of life. I ponder the inside and I ponder the out. I know only too well that if the inside of me does not relate and connect with the outside of me there is trouble. If I feel one way and communicate another, I am lacking congruence. My inside, feeling as she does, is sloshing about in my drum if I don’t show her to the world. If I see injustice, feel the pain of it, the wrongness of it, and say or do nothing, I am disconnected from my own self and I will carry that disconnection like a lead weight for a long time. Regrets, shame, crimes of omission, admissions of guilt, apologies proffered, wounds healed, all will fester in a darkling silence, challenging the health and well-being of both my mind and my body. You, on the outside of me will see none of it, feel none of my disconnection. But I will.

The start point is to admit this disconnection to myself. To acknowledge that I am outside my inside and that the two haven’t been on speaking terms for way too long, is critical. Do I want to? Well, no, not really. I want the outside of me to look goodly. I want the inside of me to catch up, to hurry up and fit the space without me having to do any of this tedious inner work. But this is not how we learn, not how we grow, develop and understand the vital need to be inside out. Now, I am not saying that we need to rush out to tell folk a thing or two about what we don’t like about them. Not at all. In fact, what we find, as we admit our fear of being inside out, is that we don’t want to do that at all. What we find, as we gently open up to our own fears of being naked before all men (dreadful thought) and women (slightly less so) is that compassion arises like Venus from the waves, gentle, soft, loving and at peace with both ourselves and all those who are not us.

As I pull out the washing nowadays I smile at the inside out-ness of random things. I know this washing machine, this behemoth of importance, has a lesson to teach me. Nowadays I can inside out-flip a big duvet cover in minutes. In paying attention to something that most of us would dismiss with a worldly snort, I am learning to reconnect with the inside of me. I recommend it.

And so, it is.

by

Island Blog – From There to Here

Leaving 40 degrees and arriving back to zero in the belly of a couple of planes with the ambient temperature of an airport or two in between requires a person to be vestment canny. Well, I really don’t know what I was thinking as I packed for Africa but it appears I put little thought into my return. Today I am wearing most of my frocks over jeans with a vest at skin depth, a long sleeved tee over the said frocks and a jumper to complete my shapeless bulk. When I step outside, I add to that a puffa jacket and a scarf long enough to wind into a neck brace. A most fetching look.

I noticed, among my fellow passengers, as a foggy Glasgow appeared at the windows, that they had considered a vestment strategy. How had I not? This question has thought me a lot since I returned to zero. All I can guess is that I was in such a flapdoodle as I packed for the sunshine that my brain dealt only with the immediate. Then I realised that dealing with the immediate has become my default, for everything is immediate around dementia care and any unnecessaries are pushed into the shadowland. Although it is delightful, in many ways, to realise how much of life can be unnecessary when necessary, it behoves a girl to remember those things that still await her in the wings of her life. In Africa I went to a spa and had my nails done. This was a first for me as I usually just bite them off or clip them to the quick so as not to scratch anybody by mistake (or intentionally). I have enjoyed watching my French polish flash little white moons into my looking and this little indulgence will not revert to the shadowlands again. Although this indulgence may not be a regular thing, at least I know the pleasure of it. It isn’t just the nails and how they look. It is the time taken for myself, to sit and watch someone else caring for me. This is important, for all of us, not just me. Taking time to spend time with Me is not something many of us talk about without either getting embarrassed at the blank faces around us as we try to explain what we mean, or getting the giggles. Well, it does sound a bit ‘out there’ does it not? I think the key is not to bother explaining it at all to a world completely caught up in logic and the daily dash to Nowhere. Of course, not everyone is doing this dashing thing but most of us are if we are honest.

But the wisdoms keep coming. They go back to Rumi, to Ancient Greece, and further back, and we still don’t listen, because we have not learned how to live this way, the way of emotional intelligence, the way of good health, calm hearts and heads, peaceful sleep, gentle breathing and love of self, not matter what the demands of our lives. I don’t think it’s easy, far from it, but I do know we need to wake up to a different way of being. In a hysterically busy world we are but cogs in a million wheels, or that is how it seems. children, work, families, governments, religions, rules rules and more rules can overwhelm the very best of intentions. We can feel like tumbleweeds in a desert wind.

So how to change that feeling of being out of control of a life? I am no guru with a mouthful of answers but what I have learned in this decade of dementia care with all its associated ‘immediates’ is that I want to come out of this as intact as is possible. Too many of my compadres have fallen sick as a result of intense caring over a long period, wherein any time for self was intermittent and without a plan. Perhaps, like them, I thought it wouldn’t drag on for years but it does. Perhaps, like them, I thought I could wait for me, that I would be there at the other end, just as I was before. I don’t now. Now, I know better. This is a journey and there is no map, no destination I can stick a pin in. And it’s ok. In fact, I would not have learned the valuable lessons I have learned had dementia not come knocking. One of these lessons, the one I most value, is the importance of self love and how it never seemed important before. I don’t believe I am alone in this. With accusations of selfish up-yourself coming from older generations, schoolmarms and all the other ‘For Your Own Good’ ies, it would have cried anarchy and that meant trouble at any age. But I have learned to own the ‘selfish’ accusation and it fits me well. Let them think that, is what I said to myself and myself grinned wide.

There is no rule book for self love either. Only this. Stop and listen, as the world threatens to swallow you whole and the noise of it is deafening and the demands relentless, to what your heart whispers. Hear it and do as it guides you. Just once will do for now, because when it whispers again, you will hear it more clearly. Then go with it a second time, a third, a fourth and on and on until your heart is a match for both the outside world and the inside mind. I admit there is quite a lot of stopping required at first, until you get in step with You, but the rewards are endless. Eventually the outside of you fits the inside no matter what Life brings.

I arrive home tomorrow. Let’s see how clever I am at walking my talk when the old ways and I collide on a familiar doorstep. One thing I do believe in is all that stopping to listen to the inner whisper.

It just has to have made a difference.