What's Been Going On Around Here

Bread baking.

Garden design. Attempts at...

Planting peas on the allotment, growing chard and beetroot and courgettes to join them.

Going to see Sam Lee at the Trades Club

Meditation (or something quite like meditation)

Managing many moods and feelings some of them confusing and painful

Tying up the raspberries

Sorting out 20 of my poems for a pamphlet competition

Watching the foals grow

Proud

Spring

Back from the allotment with dirt under my nails, rhubarb to cook, flowers of wild garlic to put in a vase with bluebells and whatever else I can find in the lane later. Tomorrow we'll put up sticks and strings for the pea plants to grow up, do more weeding, strim the grass and generally tidy up in readiness for the planting, soon, of chard, beetroot, peas, and a second batch of broad beans. The strawberries are flowering profusely, promising mouth-watering treats to come. The potatoes are showing a few inches of growth.

And in the field down the road, two foals, one born yesterday, the other a day or two before. I will take photographs, I promise, before they grow much bigger. Impossibly long legs, a delicate down under the chin.

It's a pretty good time of the year to need extended time off sick.

Slowly

Wind and rain doing a passable imitation of March today. Just trying to catch up on the filing of paperwork for my mother's pensions, bank accounts, phone bills, care home fees. It has all been sitting in a basket that does service as an in tray since December. Anything that actually required action I have managed to keep up with, but the putting away of pieces of paper in an orderly fashion has been beyond me.

And here I am, week two of another period of sick leave, currently until 30th May. And about to go onto half pay. I am fragile right now. I can't be with the trauma and distress of others, as it tires and overwhelms me. I lose my boundaries, grow distressed and exhausted.

So here I am, resting and catching up with myself in all sorts of ways. Being as patient, gentle and kind as I can, as I find my way through a kind of disintegration / reintegration.

There are many invitations to become a patient. Offers of diagnostic labels, drugs, a request from school for information from my doctor about my 'condition' and 'prognosis'. If I have a condition it is traumatic grief but that isn't the one the doctor proposed.

I am healing, slowly.