Old

Maybe these moments of feeling that nothing feels right, are not wrong. The wind sighing in the elder and honeysuckle, the sound of L pushing the mower, the smell of white lilies in a pot, and glorious late afternoon August sunshine. Yet my body feels like a badly tuned radio, not receiving correctly, all hiss and static. All crackle. My throat aches but has no idea what it wants to say or to cry about. Old, old, my body feels an old thing, a fragment of a time when nothing could be made right, when there was no comfort, as certainly there is now.

Fragments

You are you but not the same you,
alive, your hair and toenails growing,
your mind on other things.
You do not remember yesterday
can't imagine tomorrow,
watch with the absorption of an infant
the single magpie who hops towards us
across the grass, glorious in black and white,
say what a handsome fellow.

You no longer ask for anything
expect anything,
yet your need has not been greater
since you were a tiny child
dependent on others
for food, clothes and shelter.

Rain

I have written about rain before
but still I'm searching for the words
to evoke its whisper rising to a hiss
as momentum and volume grow,
like the shower being turned up,
the heavens, as they say, opening,
and water falling in streams,
small, narrow, distinct, parallel,
coursing through air that was dry,
is now wet, as I open my mouth
to taste and breathe and drink.

Rain like something
being expressed, an outpouring,
a communication, a quantity
of drops falling as if meant,
intended to say something,
to convey to earth, down into the soil
into the storm drains,
the rivers and canals and watercourses
and seas a message 
something from far away
descending to become part
of our realm, down here,
gravity bound,
falling to the lowest point,
finding its level,
not stopping until
it can go
no deeper.

Going

Narrowing it all down into words now, like a weed emerging from a tiny crack between the flagstones, so warm beneath my bare feet these summer evenings. Words feel very tiny for this sense of changing light, changing appetite, changing tempo. Six weeks of summer holidays from school may have something to do with it. My mother slowing down. I've more or less given up she tells me, slumped on her bed in summer shirt and trousers I seem to have known forever. Sweet-natured physios encourage her to stand and turn and sit, stand and turn and sit, bed to chair, chair to bed. She is by turns funny, and savage in her response to their gentleness. She pulls faces, she complains it's all such a fuss. Don't touch me she snarls. The young Asian physio, pulls her helping hand away, smiles quietly. Why are they so beautiful to me these young women, their enormous patience and kindness, their simple desire to help? My mother on the road to nowhere, puts herself in our hands entirely, and we must decide what is best now to do. Next weekend we three siblings will come together here to have this archetypal conversation, over wine and good food, strawberries, gooseberries, bilberries, all the plenty of West Yorkshire. Try to decide if our mother can go home, or where home is going to be now - a home?

And I am well, and I am intact, and I am, somehow, ready for this. Sad, oh yes. Sorry. Yes. But I confess (must it be a confession?) I am feeling an unexpected sense of liberation. The clinging, needy, demanding mother has gone. I no longer have to phone her twice a week, to hear the same refrain of how much it means to her to hear my voice, what a difference it makes. I no longer have to go and sit beside her watching tennis, drinking wine, dredging for conversation. Taking her white lilies. The sharp mixture of sadness and freedom is not what I would have guessed.

Now I take her hand, lean my head into hers, try to imagine what it feels like to begin the sentence I really feel I ought to be going... then taper off, unable to finish the thought, much less the sentence.

25

Off soon with our picnic of various Marks and Spencer's goodies (pork pies, marinated prawns, Greek style cheese pies, cherry frangipane slices), a little tub of salad, and a very cold bottle of Cava, complete with proper wine glasses. We shall sit in our place between the holly and the hawthorn, looking down into the greens of the trees in the clough, and celebrate our quarter of a century together, and be amazed!

Must Not Be Blank

A fly inches up the window. It is as if someone were pulling a little string, tug tug tug and sending it like a Christmas toy hilariously up the glass. Only it isn't Christmas. It's the other highly charged side of the year. Thirty-five years ago the unbearable tension in my home was about to erupt. The protracted process of my parents' separation would begin with my sister telling me that my mother wanted to leave my father. And then a few incomprehensible weeks of knowing this when my father didn't. That summer I left the school I'd attended for eight years, my best friend moved away, and suddenly I was faced with the prospect of leaving the house where I'd lived for eleven years, and going to live in another town, without my father. Carefree summer after the big exams, but I was lying awake at night crying, my childhood in ruins.

Diaries

An awkward pile of diaries of different sizes, spanning the years 1976 to 1985. A jumble of days from long ago.