Dry

The whole town centre under water Christmas night into Boxing Day. The rain stopped, the waters receded, the clean-up begins. Up here on the tops we are dry and grateful. How many times can our little town recover from this onslaught?

Accidental

Is there a scream that
could slip sideways from my mouth
like a silent bird?

A Loss Again

My Aunt T died on Sunday afternoon, just sat down on her sofa, complained of feeling breathless, and went. Pretty good way to go, without pain or distress. She's been growing frail, and had some health issues, but nothing which exactly predicted this, now. But she has not recovered from my uncle's death sixteen months ago and after 65 years of happy marriage, I don't think she ever would have. As well as being my uncle's wife all those years, she was my Mum's best friend for even longer - since they were eight years old. It was because of their friendship that Aunt T and Uncle R met, fell in love very young, and never looked at anyone else. Both adored my Mum, and she them, but I think there was always a deep, complicated, and unspoken sense of loss for her. Well, it somehow doesn't feel surprising all three have died within sixteen months of each other. We toasted all three in malt whisky on Monday evening, when we had just heard the news. The week after next we'll be back at the same beautiful village church in Buckinghamshire for the third funeral.

So, five deaths in two years. If possible, I'd like some respite now please. But I have no idea who is in charge of these things. It is all feeling too much right now what with the job disappointment, the loss of a friend, the culmination of complex processes in relation to my mother's estate, with papers to be signed before both my siblings head for far away places for several weeks, and now this final loss of my dear aunt, and with her of an era.

Lost

I have lost a friend. Painfully. Strangely. Something got a bit messy between us, and I expressed concern and have now been shut out entirely, like a cold steel shutter coming down in front of a shop, with that sharp rattle and crash, then locked into place. Of course that is a very short version of a very long story, but I am feeling the loss and the rejection today. It's not the fact that something could go wrong in a friendship that hurts, it's her total lack of interest, curiosity or concern to hear or try to understand my point of view, my feelings. The apparent loss of any feeling about it, about me.

Fear Of Falling

Snow. Ice. Eye watering wind. Dazzling low sunlight. The fear of falling. The joy of woolly hats, mittens, cowls and snoods! Five weeks until Christmas. Flowers in a vase on the table, given to me by my colleagues when we parted on Wednesday, and a box of chocolates, only one or two remaining now. Leaving there, having handed over my keys, and collected the toys and figures that were mine - witch, wizard and dragon, incredible hulk, and lots of animals, wooden buildings and superheroes, I suddenly did not belong. Sitting drinking tea with four colleagues, I felt part of something, included. Walking across the road and getting into my car, driving home and bringing inside the flowers, chocolates, the figures, and all the shopping I'd bought on the way, I was no longer included, no longer belonged. Such an abrupt transition. I fell into the dark for a while.

There is a very small girl in me who is unable to hold the relativity of these kinds of changes and transitions, who interprets endings as 'the end' and a real threat to her well-being and ongoing sense of coherent self. She is frightened, she panics and despairs. It's my job to help her with that. I'm not saying all the pain and loss are in the past - there is present pain, loss and disappointment as well as anger and confusion about this job. But my competent adult self knows she can manage these, and that life will always bring another day, another change in the light, another beginning, another job. Until the final change, of course, and then there will always be someone else whose lot is to live through the endless change that is human existence.

Out

So, a job interview on Thursday, and on Friday the news I hadn't got it. Deflating after working with the team one day a week for the last four months. On the other hand this job was not truly the greatest fit for my skills and style. But I liked my manager, the building, the team, and the short commute. Struggling in the aftermath with a feeling of falling back into the void - what now? Now not even the one day a week. It's been / being such a trudge back into capacity, into resilience and confidence after the blows of the last 23 months. Yes, in a month it will be two years since G was murdered. Incredible. I have stopped carrying the two stones she gave me everywhere every day (just some days, some places). Driving to the interview on Thursday, I heard her whisper 'you can do this P'. And I did, but someone else pipped me to the post, and this is life...

I fall so easily into despair, and this is what we were talking about when she vanished. Doom, catastrophe and hopelessness. And yet, only a couple of weeks ago I had rediscovered some joy in living, and the other day I actually did some writing! Leave it with me, I'll find my way out of the despair...

Don't Breathe Out

Still

Still here, though quiet. Words are difficult, or have been. I've started a drawing class to see if marks come easier. A wonderful walk today in glorious October sunshine with L whose birthday is on Sunday, and this some of the celebration. Many changes unfolding and I am sure there will be words again.

Harvest

I have distinctly felt the first touch of autumn these last two days. Heavy rain chased away the warmer air, and now the sun is back, but we're into another phase.

A vase of flowers from the garden - the first sweet peas (at last), one white, one dark red, frothy alchemilla, a lovely mallow with darker purple veins on its pale lilac petals, penstemon, veronica, spikey petalled astrantia, and something with small dark red flowers I think is a godetia. They are all together in an old milk bottle marked Hornby & Clarke, which L dug up in our London garden years ago.

Still eating gooseberries, dark as plums, tender broad beans, sweet tasting 'early' potatoes whose skins insist on floating off as they cook, nutty flavoured bristly courgettes, strawberries, raspberries, lettuce and mizuna. The runner beans are flowering scarlet on the allotment as they scramble up their hazel wigwam. And we have seedlings of rocket and chard growing on in the cold frame for later crops.

Summer

This summer is rather hard to love. A blanket of cloud of varying colour and density keeps the sun from warming and brightening our days almost every day. Just occasionally, the cloud disperses, the sun shines and the air begins to warm, we sit ourselves outside, apply sun cream, remember what we thought summer was originally intended to mean. These occasions last sometimes more than half a day...

My mother used to struggle with the way weather affected her mood, and be vociferously indignant when it was ghastly! Lowering (pronounced louring) was a word she often used to describe just such skies as we have seen rather too much of this summer. Definitions include dark and threatening, and I think it was some kind of threat that my mother used to sense, or you might say project into these heavy dull skies. And I have become more like her as I have grown older, even as I have deepened my understanding of the early roots of the feeling that is triggered. For me the departure of brightness, the absence of the sun and its warmth, create a perfect sensory metaphor for abandonment, loss, separation, ending. The mood that can seize me - a depressive one, if you will - is one in which all goodness has departed, the best is past, and now only bleakness and doom remain. I try to think of it as theatre lighting, to consider the skill used by its technicians to create mood and meaning by adjustments to the angle, brightness, colour or tint of the onstage lighting. I try to find the place inside me where I feel well, supported and know that I have not been abandoned. Hard work.

Today I have taken garden waste, cardboard and empty cartons to the tip, been to Lidl to buy amongst other things 70% dark chocolate with small caramel chips in it, goats cheese, nectarines and a little basket of single clove garlic. I learned that they do not sell fresh ginger. So I bought some from The Bear, a rather fine wholefood shop nearby, as well as some ground ginger, some fine wholewheat flour and some blackcurrant and apple concentrate. Sliced fresh ginger infused in boiling water is my favourite afternoon beverage and very good for the digestion. Good news to report, since we're on the subject - my gut doing very much better and I think I've put on a pound or so! Certainly eating a whole lot more these last few weeks, and able to enjoy the raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants and gooseberries we have been growing in abundance in garden and allotment. We made ten jars of gooseberry jam at the weekend!

So, yes, summer is still performing some of its expected miracles!

Rough With The Smooth

So, I started work, and all is well, though on the first day I inadvertantly boarded the wrong train, had to hop off at the next station and catch a later one, and was therefore ten minutes late. What a surprise and a joy to find my manager had made me a cup of tea, knowing that I had a session booked and would not have time to get a drink. He has won me over altogether.... Client sessions went well, and I can see I will in time get the hang of the monstrous web-based database wherein all data must be stored. I am happy to be at work again, though there is much adjustment to accomplish.

The only real drawback has been taking zopiclone in order to ensure sleep for the first two days (a week apart, you remember I'm only working one day a week). It works like a charm at disabling the anxiety-producing part of my brain, and allowing sleep to ensue. Sadly for two days after taking it I suffer some kind of brain chemistry perturbation that makes for a mixture of depression and stress when there are no external stressors, and the poor gut is not so happy either. Ah, me, I am not a good subject for allopathic medicine. Pragmatically I am glad of the assistance it afforded, but am more or less resolved to do without next week, feeling much less anxious about the whole business.

Well

At last the new job is confirmed. Been a bit of a saga for one reason and another, but let's draw a veil over that and just be glad that I start the week after next, one day a week, for eight weeks initially. I'll let you know how I get on.

Notebooks arrived. 7pm yesterday...

Old Notebook

The old notebook, begun in May last year, is full, and I have ordered more (10 x A4 exercise books, plain, blue covers) which apparently someone tried to deliver today. Total mystery since I was here and had gone upstairs for maybe one minute, came down to find an email alerting me to a failed delivery attempt. What a strange world we live in. The door was open as it was (finally) a warm day, so was it not obvious I was here? A second attempt will be made tomorrow.

Meanwhile this from last September

I try to gather here the pieces
that can be assembled
into one of those moments of clarity,
of a certain rightness - a poem.
Like the starlings assembling
in the elder bush, ten or fifteen at a time,
noisy, greedy, reaching for dark berries
with their hard beaks, swaying
as their own weight
bends the supple branches,
beginning to open the oily fans of their wings
for balance, then suddenly,
at the approach of a car,
all lifting messily off and flying away,
returning seconds later
to continue the difficult feast.

Perhaps it's called Difficult Feast, what do you think?

Knock Knock

A work opportunity appears to be knocking. The chance to start gently with a day or so a week, and see how it goes. Working with children again. Amazed. Grateful. Blessed. The day the weather changed...

Thinning Fog

This week I've been to the dentist and the hairdresser, had a filling and a haircut. I also met my poet friend, A, this morning to do some writing together, first time in a long time, since my Mum died in fact. She's having a dreadful time with work stress, and took time out from crying and worrying to sit with me, drink tea and write. We used Mark Doty and Anne Carson as inspiration.

Also, I went to meet other people bereaved by suicide on Wednesday, a small warm group, a space to talk offered as part of a festival of death and dying in our neighbouring town, called Pushing Up Daisies. A marvellous encounter, and the meeting of a need I didn't even know I had. I hope we may meet again.

It's been a time of travelling in fog. Some dim shapes are beginning to emerge, a slight inkling of a future. Too soon to make them out distinctly, but the suicide group and the writing meeting have helped me begin to see them.

This weekend my brother and my sister will be here. First time we'll all have been together since my Mum's funeral.

Mothers

A week in Scotland, looking at the sea. One day a fox on the beach. One evening a badger in the garden, one morning a snake on the path. Watching cormorants in flight - a colony on the cliffs near where we stayed. Bluebells just opening everywhere we went. Day after day waking to the light on the water, the long slow out and in of the tides across the sands. Waves breaking right to left across our line of vision across the Solway Firth, the channel between Cumbria on the English side, and Dumfries and Galloway on the Scottish.

After months of digestive unease, and slightly concerning weight loss, I'd had a battery of tests and all had come back looking healthy, so a good time to go away. Disconcerting to have this diminished body, even reassured that it isn't telling me anything sinister (I have had to change the way I eat quite drastically because of the digestive difficulties and eating a lot less carbs explains it pretty well.) Tightening my belt, buying new trousers, feeling bones I didn't used to know about... I feel older, less substantial, uncertain who I am. And this extends beyond my body sense. A loss of identity, a feeling of being adrift without bearings. Driving in fog or a blizzard. There are poems suggesting themselves but I can't reach them yet.

I've lost two mothers. I try to keep faith with them both.

Just

Notes To Self

Always have fresh flowers in the house.
Make kefir - drink kefir.
Do some exercises every morning - even for three minutes.
Meditate (nearly) every morning - no judgement about the leaping monkey that is my mind. Five minutes in - 'what did you say we were supposed to be doing....?'
Keep remembering to be kind kind kind.
Walk every day. Take in something from the walking - the lapwings, the curlews, the light.
Sing to yourself, to G and to Mum.
Remember this is not forever.

Still Here

My Mum died in the early hours of Sunday 8th February, peacefully, in her sleep. I feel like I've been a very long way away from here. The funeral was last Friday. I am absorbing, processing. Also caught up in the swirl of being an executor of her will, and former attorney with administrative tasks to sort out in the wake of her death. I'm tired to my bones and have few words now, but will write again when I can.

S Is For...

... snow!!! About six inches today. It fell and it fell and it fell. We didn't go anywhere. Watched from the window as our car and garden disappeared under soft white curves.

...and snot, which has hijacked my life for a week now. I will spare you the details. Tissues have been a major part of my life. I can't think or feel properly. Yesterday I thought I was really beginning to recover, but the grade of snot has thickened today (sorry I was sparing you the details wasn't I?). Feeling adrift in my mind, adrift in my days, and the snow is mesmerising and faintly anxiety-provoking.

...and shingles, with which L was diagnosed last Friday. A strange uneasy condition. She doesn't have too many of the blisters but those that there are feel sometimes itchy, sometime sore, and sometimes cause strange nerve pain, sort of burning and sharp, as I understand it.

Strange days...