Boards

Rain. A lot of rain this morning, and a slidy clay mud path along the edge of the inexplicable pit dug right next to the building where I work began the day with more challenge than I needed the day my Mum moved into a care home. Is this a metaphor for what we do here? I wondered. Boards were provided for students to walk somewhat safely to their appointments. They teetered and slid along and arrived with almost mud free shoes unlike my own which sat and dried on some cardboard in my room, while I conducted all sessions in my socks, only rather late in the day wondering if this seemed strange to the girls far too polite to say if so.

Watering the courgettes and beans and rocket, and dead-heading the petunias, in my pyjama trousers, Sleepio t shirt and favourite red and black check cardigan, as the sky briefly puts on a display of glorious flung cloud laced with pink. Walking around the gable end I feel the sun's heat radiating back at me from the stones that have absorbed it all day.

Night

Night, though so early, and I turn a daddy longlegs away at the door. Shoes, long trousers, jacket. All these strange items re-entering my field of awareness. There is nothing in this world but change.

First

I have just lit the woodburner for the first time of the season. I don't seem to have lost my touch.

Radio 6 music for company. Goldfrapp choosing lovely records - currently Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie. One of those tracks that makes you think you never need to hear anything else again ever.

Outside wind.

I am alone and cooking a chicken breast that I felt might be slightly past its sell by date, but have decided (guided by the nose) that it's ok. Marinaded in lemon juice, olive oil, chillie and garlic from the allotment. Cooking Charlotte potatoes also from the plot, chard and broad beans ditto. Considering pudding. Oral comforts for me. And the fire.

Can't get my brother to communicate about his latest experience, taking my Mum to visit the care home we like. I know he'll reappear but hard to wait at this crucial stage.

Drinking my mother's White Burgundy. Cheers, Mum.

Yourself

Your fingernails have grown far too long
and there is old food or worse underneath them.
I have brought clippers and I cut them for you,
pinching you only once,
leaving dull crescents
on the wooden bench.
Some fall through
the slats to the concrete slabs beneath.

When I have filed each nail,
and with a careful finger
you have checked for rough edges,
you tell me you feel like yourself again.

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.