S Is For...

... snow!!! About six inches today. It fell and it fell and it fell. We didn't go anywhere. Watched from the window as our car and garden disappeared under soft white curves.

...and snot, which has hijacked my life for a week now. I will spare you the details. Tissues have been a major part of my life. I can't think or feel properly. Yesterday I thought I was really beginning to recover, but the grade of snot has thickened today (sorry I was sparing you the details wasn't I?). Feeling adrift in my mind, adrift in my days, and the snow is mesmerising and faintly anxiety-provoking.

...and shingles, with which L was diagnosed last Friday. A strange uneasy condition. She doesn't have too many of the blisters but those that there are feel sometimes itchy, sometime sore, and sometimes cause strange nerve pain, sort of burning and sharp, as I understand it.

Strange days...

All I Have To Do Is Dream

The eve of New Year's Eve, and snow still lying, frozen and compacted in some places, melting in others. It fell copiously on Boxing Day evening. Early that morning L's Mum died peacefully in her bed in the care home where she lived. She had severe dementia and it had been many years since she recognised L or anyone else. A difficult loss to fathom. L moving through memories and moods, and we wait to know when the funeral will be.

A ukelele has arrived in our home! The inspired Christmas gift from L to both of us. It is red and oh so small! And I am rediscovering the feel of making chords and strumming, at least 35 years after I last played the guitar at all regularly. And L is getting her fingers around these skills for the first time. We explore the internet for songs to play and since ukeleles have become flavour of the times, we find plenty to entertain us. Today I was singing and strumming the Everly Brothers' All I Have To Do Is Dream. It's such good fun, and the fingers on my left hand are already developing the beginnings of familiar callouses after being rather sore for the first few days! The main problem is my hands are quite big and the frets of a ukelele are small. Watch this space to see if I decide I really must get a guitar again after all these years...

Holy Heathen

Here I am enjoying the only thing that passes for Christmas music in our house - Waterson : Carthy's Holy Heathens and the Old Green Man. Last track now - Gloryland! So here I am heathen as ever, yet moved by the fantasy of 'a land beyond the stars - Gloryland, bright gloryland', drinking tea, baking bread and making soup - all this and writing a blog post too! Nearly time to put the bread in the oven which will be good and hot by now, the two round loaves very nearly proved. Baking has been one of my wholesome and healing activities this year, though actually this is the first time in a while. You have to order the fresh yeast from our local organic baker's on the phone and I don't often remember. The soup is leek, potato, carrot, parsnip, onion, celery - and last year's ham stock, just cleared out of the freezer to make way for this year's, plus some of the cold turkey, and one of today's loaves. Someone will probably tell me you shouldn't keep stuff that long even in the freezer, but I've never poisoned us yet!

Christmas always makes me sad, and this year the new deep sorrow that was added this time last year is hovering close. The wreath of holly and ivy L made and hung on the front door, is fluttering in the wind. I can see it through the glass. The wild winds of the last couple of days have dropped but persist steadily. Tomorrow I'll be in full traditional mode, blanching almonds, frying them in butter, then salting them, while I listen to the carols from King's College. That's when I miss my Mum. We'll eat gammon for dinner, with parsley sauce, potatoes and vegetables, and on Christmas day the full turkey dinner around five. Most importantly L and I will exchange stockings in the morning, opening them together in bed, with cups of tea! Easily the best part of Christmas.

Okay, loaves are in, soup needs blending. Late lunch today, I think!

1

A year today since G was murdered. I sit looking out at the fading December light, the mist descending on the moors, the rain falling steadily. Behind me a beautiful and huge Christmas tree which we have today decorated, having had to go on an unscheduled mission to Wilko's in Halifax for a new set of lights! It glows and twinkles in the darkening room. Soon I will light a fire, then later cook a good meal. I have a sense of having made it through something, survived a long and difficult stretch of the journey. And here I am. So glad to be here, so grateful for my life. And for the blessing of knowing G. I talk to her more these days, smile at her when life's paradox, synchronicity or irony raise my eyebrows. Which is not infrequently. I have had two therapy referrals, and though unexpected, they seem to go along with a sense of turning tide, the beginning of knowing I have some strength, some capacity to attend to the suffering of others.

Weirdly, we were to have been away this weekend, but a series of events (ice, car, sleep and stomach-related), culminating in the hotel phoning to say they had double booked our room, led to late cancellation. No regrets, not one. And the hotel are offering two nights for the price of one as an apology for the mix-up, which we plan to take up in the spring (and a bottle of prosecco in your room said the repetitively apologetic woman on the phone.) For now, home is best, and the sense of light in the darkness that the season brings is sustaining and comforting.

Willowherb In Words

Exploring last year's notebook, the one I was writing in before G died, I find in July I was adoring the willow herb in its prime....

It's the willowherb again and again
calling to my eye - tall, in serried ranks
marching up railway embankments and hillsides
as if guarding something with its tall green army,
its pink flowers pointing to the sky
each floret slowly opening out of a small pink finger
layer by layer, each of which will wither, fade, fall,
give way to the seeds carried in white fluff
which in three or four weeks will be blowing
about everywhere, looking for places
to sow itself and build next year's army
and then and then and then there'll be the glory
of all the leaves slowly slowly dying in shades
of red and gold, marvelous demise over weeks,
all the way into November, last year glowing
in the fog of my fiftieth birthday.

And in August

Is it the height of the rose bay willowherb
or the sheer quantity, the tall ranks of slender
individual plants making a mass of green
and pale purple now against the hillside
as it stretches up towards the tops?
There is something of the invading army
or the defending army, keeping out something worse
that might invade, colonising great stretches of railway embankment,
great swathes of verge beside lanes and paths,
thin and tall, the light filtering between the stems,
a blur of purple flowers as the train
moves fast past where they have climbed
to the top of the cutting.
And one by one the flowers will drop to leave
fine pinkish red fingers pointing upwards
each of which will in time open to release
the cotton wool tufts carrying the seeds
to be blown to another patch where
they can begin again.

5

On 1st December 2009 The Phoenix rose from Smoke And Ash and I posted here for the first time as Fire Bird. The work on our new house was in progress, and seemed somehow a fitting metaphor for my recovery from the fiasco with corporate-style-children's-charity-which-cannot-be named. Everything stripped back and having to be reconstructed.

I never expected to be where I am this December, struggling to recover from a blow far more devastating. I will rise once again in time from the ashes.

Fog

Fog today.

I could leave it at that.

Remembering G telling me how she liked fog.

The dampness on my coat, the tiny droplets that day.

From G's window another valley she often looked out at while I got my shoes and coat on at the end of the session. Even this time last year. Still then.

To be seen, understood, accepted and loved in one's rawness and vulnerability a rare and precious gift. To lose this a raw and aching loss. It goes on and I go on.