Webs

I have now got so many small jobs, I actually struggle to answer the question how many? I work in five different settings, one of them being my home where my private practice is based. Another job, though working for an organisation in a nearby town, mostly involves working from home. There are two schools and a university. At the moment my head feels a messy jumble of fragments of work-related information. Most of the work is new, and there is much I don't yet know or understand, loads I need to do and haven't yet got to grips with. I don't like the way this is making me feel. I fear I may not have the right temperament for a 'portfolio career'. But at least I have work. When I look back a year, I am at least very grateful for that.

Spiders everywhere. In their webs in corners, at the tops of window frames, between car wing mirrors and cars. Wherever I am, on a train, in a room, driving, I seem to look up and see the striped legs of a spider, when I'm walking invisible webs brush my face.

A starts a Masters degree tomorrow at the university where he did his first degree. You can imagine my pride and pleasure, and my slight trepidation...

Warm weather just this side of the equinox. Golden autumn days, and t shirts, cut-offs and sandals get a reprieve from stowing away for the winter.

We went to see the new Almodovar film, The Skin I Live In, on Sunday. The man's a genius in my book. He's just 62, and the older he gets, the more accomplished his work becomes. I don't really do reviews, but I recommend it very highly. A few adjectives to whet your appetite. Theatrical, balletic, mythic, absurd, mysterious, subtle, grotesque, beautiful, disturbing, strange.

I will try to write here more again. It has been an odd time. I need to find a prompt to get me in the New Post box regularly.

The Best Email I've Ever Had

From A's most excellent friend B this afternoon:

Hi Everyone,

I picked A up from the hospital today for the last time! He is all moved out and back at his flat full time. The improvement in him in just a week is really incredible; he is, as far as I can see, back to his old self... calm and relaxed...

I feel like hanging out flags and singing. I have lit a beautiful blazing fire in the woodburner and will play some joyful music. May he go from strength to strength.

Rainbow

So, it looks likely that A will be allowed to go home on Monday, and the next chapter will begin. I am weary, devoid of thought, relieved, unable to be entirely relieved. The intensity of the last two months and more has exhausted my capacity for anxiety, for now at least. I am happy for him that he can return to his beloved flat, will have privacy, autonomy, choice restored to him. His recovery is not complete, but considerable, and being out of that disturbing environment will, I hope, allow another phase of healing to begin.

An old friend has tracked me down via the internet. It's the second time this has happened to me. Last time it was a university friend, and we had a rather intense flurry of correspondence some years ago, which culminated in a couple of meetings, then gradually faded away. This time it's a sixth form friend with whom I lost touch when we all went off to university, and maybe more significantly when I moved with my mother to London around the same time. I am enjoying a rather frequent exchange of bits of our life-stories, memories and updates about mutual friends. I don't expect to sustain it, but it's rather compelling for now, and has steeped me in memories of that time, and in some strange sense of connection, of the simple continuation of all our lives in parallel. We'll all be fifty in the next year or so, along with my dear old earlier school friends. A time to ponder the passing of time, the coming and going of friendship, the ordinariness and specialness of all our lives. I find I feel validated, made more real in some odd way by this exchange.

A lovely rainbow appears as I write, the third or fourth we've seen this week - I go to the door and stand with my face upturned to the rain and the sunlight. A perfect arc, and the hint of another above it. Raindrops on my glasses now as I write.

Autumn

Storm force winds now beginning to die down, still sighing in the chimney, as our first truly successful fire settles to a glow in the woodburner.

So today at last L made jam, something she has been talking about and saving jars for for - well for years actually. We even moved house with a box of jars! It's plum jam. She made five jars, sweet and red. And I remembered this - the poem and the time, many years ago now in another Yorkshire house, my sister-in-law making the jam, my lovely A the boy with cool hands.

Plum Jam

That one afternoon in the heart of autumn

When the light bled away from the windows

As we all sat together stoning plums

In a warm kitchen with condensation on the glass.

The growing heap of plum-halves in the shining pan,

The pale stones drying at my elbow

As you poured white cascades of sugar.

The smell of simmering fruit,

My back to the door, feet under the table,

And the boy with cool hands who came in moccasins

To perch on my knee.

Sweet

Sweet peas in a white vase, while the wind hurls itself at the trees, roars in the newly lined chimney.

How to write when the known world has dissolved?

Then A texts Chat? and I call him. He's looking forward to seeing me on Thursday, but the reception is bad and we get cut off, I try again. The wind is howling in the sitting room so I go upstairs for a better signal. We talk some more, he says he'd like to go out for a meal with me and his friend B. I've just been told today by a member of ward staff he has two hours' leave a day, but by B that he won't make it to meet me for dinner, will probably meet for a drink later with his girlfriend who has just started her first teaching job. As always, I must wait and see what is actually possible. Mostly I shall just be happy to be with him again.

Happy Birthday

It is A's 24th birthday, and I am happy to say he will not spend it in hospital, as he has been granted a day's leave, and will be out and about with six of his friends. The friends are thoughtful, and will spend much of the day with him in pairs, all coming together for a big picnic. The forecast for his part of the world is hot and sunny, a blessing he richly deserves. I will try not to engage in auntly anxiety about the need for sun cream and calm.

I think nothing could have prepared me for this last two months, and I hope I am learning from them. As I gradually take up my various pieces of work again, and in one case for the first time, my mind is necessarily and usefully engaged in other things, thoughts of A must be put aside for hours at a time, and I rediscover (so far at least) a competent professional identity from which I draw much strength. I shall travel south once more next week to visit my mother, on to Kent to see A, and then back to my mother's before returning home. I am very tired, and stress has left its mark, but I need to see them both.

Now

Now, a pair of red socks hangs beside a white sheet

in sunlight whose warmth heads off autumn

and you are painting the gate before the rain returns.