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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.

Willowherb IV

Last day of September

13.16 To Leeds

Did you get that last text? says a woman across the aisle, very loudly into her mobile phone. The couple in the seats in front do not appear startled. An area of Manchester Victoria Station under development is crammed full of cranes and diggers of various sizes, yellow and red with names like Ultra Boom and Liebherr The sky's the limit, Easi Utilities and Speedy. Miles of blue plastic mesh form gentle barriers alongside the track as we head towards Rochdale. We pass Brewery Junction and the Sapphire Garage, the Sharp project (entrance next left via Thorp Road) and the train cleaning and servicing depot.
An announcement describes the train as an 'express' service which merely seems to mean it misses the first three stations, though it stops at a further seven en route for Leeds. It chugs along, noisy and lurchy, at its usual pace, proudly missing Moston, Mills Hill and Castleton.
The trees show areas of changing colour amongst the dusty green leaves of late summer, then the startling red of hawthorn berries.
A strange-looking man with a Frankenstein's monster haircut waits on the platform at Rochdale station, but evidently not for this train, somewhat to my relief.
So many other train journeys are woven into the experience of this one. Other September days, when the weather teetered on a knife edge between summer and autumn, the sky pale blue with fine-spun white cloud, at any moment ready to turn the sunshine hazy, the air cool. The camp young man in Next, where I purchased the only desirable item of clothing in the whole shop - a stripy tee shirt - using the gift card I was given when I left my job, complained of being indoors when the sun was shining. He said that yesterday he'd gone out in his sunglasses for a cigarette break, and it had gone all dull, but he was hoping the sun would be shining today when he got off work at 5.30. I hoped so too.

Stones Aberdaron Beach

Willowherb III

First week of September

Fireweed seed

Godspeed