Monday Morning

Awake between 3.30 and 5.00, ruminating on the frustrations of communication with the school, on how to be gracious about my poet friend's partner's offer to advise me about the correct storage of my father's letters (an offer which includes an invitation to show them to her), and on my mother's deteriorating memory. And once again vague discomfort in my stomach has me reaching for the antacid tablets, the wind in the chimney has me reaching for the earplugs.

Now the wind continues its fretful utterance down the chimney, and a car alarm whines thinly somewhere nearby, and banks of dark clouds with thinner patches blow across the struggling sun, the light changing moment by moment. My tea mug is emptied to the last cooling inch, and I have been looking up archive storage solutions for the letters, wondering if I can afford any of them, if they are really necessary, if the best thing isn't just to scan them all then put them away in a big white envelope. The idea of scanning 73 letters, many of them running to 4, 6 or 8 pages, fills me with a kind of miserable lethargy. Or maybe the miserable lethargy comes first, makes such a task a mountain. Partly it's that I have no knowledge of how to use the scanner, a new toy of L's.

Yesterday I walked in the afternoon in the wind and the mud, buffeted and sloshing down the field to the swollen and surging beck, slithering back up the hillside where I want my ashes scattered, where L and I had our handfasting, read our vows and poems and cried and cried. And I couldn't see a future, though I could see the buds swelling purple on the trees in the clough. I climbed the steep hill, thinking that I don't know what I want my life to be only not this, fighting tears, not wanting to encounter a neighbour or a stranger, wet-faced, crooked-mouthed. Saved the tears for later, at home, with L, who probably welcomes them, easier to respond to than the silent and repressive misery that usually precedes them.

The car alarm finally stops needling my ears and now attention reverts to the wind, which builds to crescendos of urgency, then fades to weary lulls. I feel hectored, nagged, pushed and pulled by its insistence. Can't relax. Bushes and trees tremble and dance, telegraph wires bounce, the clouds keep moving along, moving along.

Later someone unknown and unnamed (so far) will phone me for a 15 minute telephone interview for the Census Collector job. A little ray of hope of at least getting some kind of meaningful money in the bank without having to ask my mother for it. The whole country must be asked questions, and some, like us, will enjoy it, others will complain and delay, or refuse, or just always be out. For today I will be asked questions on the phone, and will endeavour to give the right answers.

Two friends had significant funerals to go to last week. C's mother was sent off kindly in a wicker coffin with fresh flowers, though painfully her siblings had arranged the whole thing without C. And K said goodbye to her friend, and was happy that she had done her best for G, is now spending all available time with G's daughter, whom she describes as 'vulnerable', but is able to call the experience a privilege. Respect to K whose capacity for giving is a thing I can only look on at in wonder.