Remember Remember

Down to the allotment in dazzling sunlight this morning to pick kale, broccoli and chard. Then under the trees behind the plots with my big blue IKEA bag to collect firewood. It is more hidden now than the last time, a thick carpet of russet, yellow and gold leaves covers quite a lot of the wind fallen branches, but still it only takes twenty minutes to fill my bag to the top with kindling and some slightly wider gauge wood. I love this, scanning the ground, bending down to pick up sticks that can go straight in my bag, long branches I have to break into smaller lengths, with a series of satisfying cracks and snaps. I love it too because at G's funeral, her partner F spoke about the first and the last time he saw G. The last time, a few days before she died, they gathered firewood in Heaton Park in Manchester, slightly expecting at any moment a '50s style park keeper to come and tell them off. G full of delight at getting something for nothing! Gathering wood for the fire will always be one way I can feel close to her.

Now, I am making a mixed vegetable soup - onion, celery, carrot, parsnip with a little fresh red chilie - for tomorrow's lunch, when my friend C will be here. Listening to Bob Dylan's Modern Times.

Yesterday something loosened its grip on me, when I remembered that it is five years ago exactly that I was suspended from my job with corporate-style-children's-charity-which-cannot-be-named. My birthday was on Sunday that year. It was the end of half term. I went in to work on Monday morning, and in a team meeting the shit began to hit the fan, and later copiously in a one to one meeting with one of the big managers from London, who explained that a complaint had been made by one of my team about my private blog (the late lamented Smoke and Ash). The floor fell from under me, my stomach followed. The next day I was suspended on full pay. I never returned. My body is incredibly sensitive to the return of the times of the season, of the year, when traumatic things have happened to me. I knew I was beginning to feel unease and a renewed grief as G's anniversary approaches. But I had totally forgotten what was happening to me in November 2009. The last time my world fell apart. It all makes sense to me, or to my body at least, and I feel an easing in me I can't rationally explain, but it is so. Remembering rather than repeating.

Afternoon

Afternoon, and the low sun floodlights the fields.
At the same time an intimation of the coming darkness.
Schoolchildren in blue uniforms arrive back on a yellow bus.
I eat fudge and wonder at the size of a lily flower,
my eyes sore again from crying.

Willowherb V

52

So, I've been 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,
14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,
23,24,25,26,27,28,
29,30,31,32,33,
34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,
42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51
for a year each. Now it's the turn of
52
for me to be it,
or have it as the French say.

Flag

Feeling of overall well-being my foot!
I traveled to London to visit my Mum
who is thin and forgetful
and fell asleep after lunch
while I arranged white lilies in a vase.

All the minimum wage carers doing their best
and assisting old people in taking their drugs.
All the non-white carers
assisting the posh white old people.

Six trains in one day
and then
depression fell like a flag.

Hurrah!

Morning mist hangs, blurs the horizon, blows slowly across the fields. A small murmur from the central heating.  A partial solar eclipse today, but not visible here. Evening in North America so I read. And the sun edges into Scorpio, and my astrologer friend suggests this and a new moon, also in Scorpio, are auspicious and my energy and life-force will be revitalised! She adds  there’s a feeling of overall wellbeing over the last weekend of the month (25^th – 26^th) when Sun, Venus and Neptune all align to ease your path.  It’s about time!

All I can say is Hurrah!

Autumn Leaves

You can smell it. Even when there are half hours warm enough to sit outside. The next half hour it's time to find the woolly hat and gloves, then take them off mid-walk. Autumn, and every street has a leafy border now, rustling in the wind. How did this happen? Birthday season almost upon us. Relentlessly the months have passed, and soon it will be ten, and before very long, god help us, the first anniversary. Already my mother's first year in her care home completed. That indigestible change came just before G was murdered and everything rendered unrecognisable.

I've a sense now of surveying the pieces scattered about on the shore after the shipwreck. Some familiar, some broken, some inexplicable, some lost. Picking them up, turning them over in my hands, and looking for new ways to bring them all together. I am glad to be on dry land, and wondering how to patch up the ship. Glad I didn't drown. Sometimes. Mostly.