Chapter 9: Words From June 2013
The Navigator Is Drunk
I would have liked to tell my stepdaughter how beautiful she looked, in her wedding gown, no surface gloss beauty: the real glow. I think she knew, anyway: Little Grandson had run to the unfenced edge of the high church wall to wave at Mum in the wedding charabanc. And his shirt was untucked, so there were two Granma jobs to keep my mind from crying. People do cry at weddings, I know, but I might not be able to stop. This confident, quirky boy stands on a grave and smiles. Life prevails. Celebration prevails. Love is worth the risk of loss.
Bunting aplenty at the marquee: handmade, yards and yards of candy prints, hours and hours of fine work. Cupcakes, homemade, iced and glittered, place names, all hand written. It all comes down to love.
The groom stole the speech show. He floored us all: no showboating: only how he misses his father, how he loves his wife. He proposed to her in a gondola: he’s that sort of chap. Every napkin holds a mascara blot. Little Granddaughter appears to save me this time, demanding a cuddle and a cake.
I am feeling better, for being here, even if my napkin is blotched.
Mr, the Father of the Bride, is feeling deeply emotional, and also the effects of liberal wine pouring. As the evening commences I have dog-minding duties, so Mr is swept along in the car.
Bouncy Beagle and Dog make use of the garden facilities. Medicinal strength espresso bubbles on the stove. The hounds are bribed back inside. Mr smiles. He says he’s fine now. We get back in the car.
’I don’t have the sat-nav, so can you give me directions?’
‘Yeah, no problem.’ Mr has a confident, caffeinated air.
First junction, I look for guidance.
He says: ‘Do you want to go right or left?’
‘I don’t know, honey, I was hoping you could give me directions?’
‘You can go any way you want.’
‘Any way?’
‘Yes, you’ll get there, you can go any way you want.’
‘Er, left?’
‘Yes, that’s fine. You can go any way you want.’
Every junction: variations on the same. Eventually I look for a patch of unlit sky (over the ocean) so I can locate the seafront and the marquee.
‘See?’ He says. ‘Any way you want. All roads lead to here.’
I don’t think they do. I think our roads lead to here though, and while we’re here we should dance.
The next morning I drive me, Mr, Boy, two dogs to the beach. Mr says ‘Take the next left.’ I say: ‘I can go any way I want.’
Laughter in the car, a light breeze in a bright sky.
Frogs Unchained
The river is lower than I’ve ever seen it. A stretch of unexplored stone and tree root lands in my lap like free tickets. I’m gone before I’ve realized I’m going to go. I see tadpoles and shout about it. I see the river fall deep from the mud and stone shore. There’s a world down there. I’m almost struck to stone by it, till the breeze and the shake of a wet dog break that spell. Sun light falls on a length of old chain. It takes my historical fancy. I pull myself up the bank of nettles under the barbed wire, declaring: ‘a piece of the chain bridge,’ before admitting: ‘in my mind, at least.’
It does have that look about it. Mr admires it and we leave it in situ, for it belongs there and some things need leaving be.
There are more tadpoles in the stream.
‘The ones in the river must have washed down,’ Mr observes.
‘They’re thriving,’ I decide. There’s not a nettle sting on me. Under the trees we walk, and the birds sing loud.
A Glass Amplifier
Yesterday:
There was website development, there was the housework backlog: there was the sun: so shiny it was causing a distraction before anyone came to make me give in to it.
Me and Little Granddaughter walked in the garden. Fat Beagle houseguest is bossed to join us, obliging even though she mispronounces his name. Owlfide sensibly rolls his fat back into the shade when the Nextdoor Chickens catch her eye. Heat makes her weary, eventually, so we lie on the sun lounger. She pokes a freckle on my arm.
‘Hurt?’
‘No, it’s a freckle.’
‘Feckle.’
‘Yep.’
‘Oh. Okay.’ She nods, rests her head on my shoulder.
I should be thinking about work but I’m thinking about holidays. Washing waves on the rotary line, makes noises of sails and flags. We lie on the sun chair, squint, let the blaze and company dictate.
Today:
All the little jobs stick together, jam up the day. All day I have one eye on the stupid clock. What is it that I meant to accomplish? Was it annoyance? This is Through The Looking Glass stuff, when the more I do the less achievement registers.
Fat Beagle whines. I take him out into the dark. The air is warm. The grass is cut neat. We wander over the squares of light that fall from the stairwell window. They are so much bigger than the panes they shine through.
Some light bounces, some shimmers through.
This is the same day I have run through the fast shallows of an incoming tide, chased by a paddling Dog. I forgot to put a parking ticket in my car, and didn’t get fined. I had an ice cream. At home there was roasted chicken. This is the same day we watch the sun set: globe of smelted gold slips behind leafing trees, fizzles colour like a bicarb bath bomb.
River Swim
Slinking in the shallows of the far riverbank, this trespasser looks up under secret tree roots, sees there: white as porcelain, wide as dinner plates: flat fungus growing in neat stacks.
Over the water, a vortex of midges.
In the water, light gleams greenish clear or blurred in mud.
Rocks, deviously slippery as we cross on foot, soothe to softness when we tread deeper to swim.
Tiny fish hide: amazed, afraid fish.
This river world is no safer than any other world.
The water pours, it pulls and spools.
In the soul of the swimmer, a sense of stillness settles.
We laugh, walking home in wet shoes.
Grandad
This morning Mr’s phone will insist on bleeping. It bears news.
I can’t sleep on that news, and we have no bread. The bread maker is dragged out from under plastic baskets of brewing paraphernalia. The bread maker book opens to the page for brioche.
Sugar.
There’s the left over chicken to simmer into stock for noodles.
Spice.
While the wait hovers, because that how waiting is, not quite landed: washing is hung on the line, dogs shuffle nosy in the morning grass, a warm breeze blows over open blooms. Coffee brews: strong, strong coffee. Buttery baked aromas drift from the open kitchen window. Most of the washing up is done and drips on the draining rack, upside down and clean. A notebook open to a blank page lies on a table of life in motion, on a tide of lists and receipts and a card bought for this occasion. There is a stamp for it in the back of a floral print purse.
All things nice.
The phone rings. ‘A baby girl,’ Mr repeats: ‘a granddaughter. Ten past twelve?’
I look at the clock: it’s not past midday.
‘Oh! Twelve past ten. You sound tired,’ he says to his son. He smiles.
Ah, baby girl, how you will love the sparkle of those kind blue eyes!
Plat Du Jour
A day that crumbles through my hands, yet lands pleasingly.
After the trek to the police station to report it missing, the lost wallet turns up, for example.
I made it to the first hour of tournament training, rediscovered side kicks, skipped a shower because I forgot to bring spare clothes.
A steel thermos lid-cup of coffee waits on the dashboard while I rig up the sat nav. Metal conducts heat, I am reminded. But there’s a cloth to hand, to insulate my fingers after the first burn. Drove to meet Baby Girl, and she is the one who was only born yesterday.
She pull
s a face when I steal her from Grandad. Granmas used to smell of talc and palma violets, not sweat and muscle rub.
Baby Girl has robust hiccups.
All the time the sun shines.
At home, eat the last of the fridge chilled brioche.
Crumbs on a gold plate wait: I’ll wash up tomorrow.
The Sunday Sofa Mission
Yesterday’s adventure was a sofa. A second hand green leather squashy comfortable three seater.
Available now, for free, or it goes to the tip!
Out comes the tape measure, the soft rack, the sense of intrepid determination. The sun is bright, the air is still.
It’s a solidly heavy piece of furniture. The car roof gets a scratch: no buckling. People are staring, smiling, pointing. We are a curiosity adding to the ambience of a summery day.
At home, Mr takes the lead, proceeds into the house. I can only see his hands, wrapped around the pouffy green padding. A wiggle and a shove or two: we have a sofa. Just shy of twelve months, we have been sitting on a couch substitute. A mouldery old bed frame, pocked by woodworm; poisonous foam padding on splintering slats. We put it in the garden, make a sun bed of it for the last of its days.
Boy comes home: it’s his birthday, and he is delighted. We could go to the river with our picnic basket, but we don’t, the novel allure of sitting comfortable in our own front room being too strong.
On The Couch Substitute
Frequent thick clouds puff out the sun. The wind is brisk. But I am wearing a cardigan, being accustomed to a temperate climate. With a duvet and a rag rug, the old couch substitute is a passable sun bed. Down the lawn, daisy heads shake, as though I have just told them a very funny anecdote. Dark washing on the line billows: vampiric, cloak-like. Columbine florets in ballerina whirls.
‘There is little in this world that stays still,’ the wind says.
The house door is open and it sweeps in, looking for things to blow through.
My belly is full of good lunch.
My eyes are full of wonder.
Sometimes when I was thus occupied, as a daydreaming child, my father would be saying something and, vaguely aware of words, I would turn to look at him.
‘In one ear and out the other,’ he said, often amused, often annoyed.
So I tilt my head now and let the wind blow, in through one ear, and out the other.
A Stuffed Head
While the sky is busy with rain and cloud and an unsummery breeze, windows and doors are pulled shut, indoor things are done by people.
I assume Mr is doing work, though he may just be walking up and down stairs and turning his laptop on and off as part of some ritual. As it also involves bacon sandwiches there is no need to interfere.
What I am doing is work though it confuses me by throwing visually pleasing, interesting, provoking and fun into the mix.
And there’s bacon: is this recipe correct?
Research progresses through classic patterns of order and chaos, expansion and contraction. From flat stated facts, figures, folk art, the cold glaze of a pot, the captured life of a photograph, knowledge makes connections with imagination, with experience.
One stuffs one’s head and allows to ferment.
[’The sprouts of modernity?’ What a chapter title that is! Into the pot!]
Giant Slumbers
Bullock heads stoop in the field, take breakfast on a slope.
Rolls of bumped fields, crumpled in places like coverlets: at any moment the incumbent could throw them off and rise.
Crow holds his branch tight with piercing claws: feathers blown, eyes sharp.
No ancient gargantuan stirs today.
Only leaves that catch the wind and curl branches into dervish shapes; only crow on the wing, only strolling cattle.
Tarmac lanes are wet grey, reflective of the sky.
Towards the town the wider roads fill; the inch and spill of morning traffic, pent concerns of the late, sleepy grumble, a glint of excitement; for the most part, stiff and slow.
Brave Old World
It came good, the weather, by the afternoon.
A thick weight of sun arrives, lies on willing shoulders; glints and heats and drapes like chain mail. In the wood shade it is cooler and dangerous. In search of skin are the bites of sharp insects: thorns, faery tale thick; nettles, the height of men, bristling with stings.
The bluebells are in retreat. Campions pattern in their stead: pink petal polka dotted in the deep green. Hedges have edges of meadowsweet frill. Dragonflies are dark sparks over the bright river.
Every step is worth the peril.
Hedge Lesson
Yesterday’s morning: the hedgerow grasses rubbed like dry lips.
Clouds wrung out drops.
In the afternoon, wet-dabbed flora shivered.
A choppy sun was there, sudden and warm.
All day the wind howls. A half load of washing takes every peg.
Fourth Leaf Luck
The old wood path is disappearing.
Brambles gain impressive ground and girth. The ferns are most prolific and big enough to eat me up.
Smugly, all my skin is covered. Once or twice I must stop to get my ankles back, but I walk the path bold enough.
Bluebells in ebb; foxgloves and campions surge. There’s a clover flood in progress. I never had much patience for searching out the four-leaved lucky stem.
‘I don’t need your fourth leaf,’ I say, ‘just a bit of fourth leaf luck please!’
All through the woods, past the troll caves, the trees all mossed, down through the leaf mulch, me and Dog: at ease. At the path junction, a decision: we will go to the river before striking homeward. At the river, meet the retired farmer and his retired farm dog, and they are on their way back from a different route. We haven’t met in a while and stop to chat: always we talk of this place, and our dogs, and the weather. His dog likes the river; he points down the different route; just along, where the bank is a gentle slope, near the island. The wind is loud he has to shout. He saw a salmon leap there once, he says, then is off home for lunchtime.
An island, he said.
I am over the gate; running through grasses, eyeing all the slipways to the river, finding ladders and rocks, and then, a gentle slope.
The island is tiny, curved and spiky. I laugh, call it a hedgehog. There’ll be no pirate treasure there my hearties, but I swear on the fourth leaf of a lucky clover: there is a dragon in the water.
The wind drops, maybe in shock, and the sun beats like a heart.
Housework, Summertime
Our washing machine busies itself; zips and buttons catch the inverted dome of glass door, add chinks of percussion to the comforting rumble.
The sky lies low, hot, heavy with cloud: one imagines it panting, a grey dog.
I wonder if a storm is due, but the birds are not silent. They chirrup shrill from branches and guttering pipes.
The rain has stopped. The house is cluttered, though clean.
Thoughts light on the next bout of clearing in our small space.
We have a dream, we work towards it.
Meanwhile, one admires the absence of dust.
It is still not raining as the washing cycle spins out.
Washing on the line is blue and white, beach hut colours.
Oak Dragon
Last night, midnight, the windows are ajar; after the rainstorm. We have the urge to breathe that cool earthy damped air.
Morning is hazy, impossible to decipher.
One might as well stride out to find a dragon, in this mysterious weather. We take the long route, enchanted by pastoral views.
The path is a tractor track, bumped and pocked with bird prints. Off track is waist high in the smoking grass pollen. To the riverside is a climb; through barbed wire, nettles, brambles, thistles; over steep muddied slipways.
And if I didn’t push through that, I would never know of this fallen tree dragon.
Walk, marvel, make a beautiful life.
Elizabeth Tudor
The frame of my mind is accepting, it lets death into the picture. It is not morbid though, as death and life give each other such power. Today is the 15th anniversary of the death of my father, whose resemblance to Henry 8th always made me hope I would grow up to be Elizabeth 1st. I liked her fierce brightness, her big dresses. I didn’t want to be Mary, all glum and locked up. My brother is nothing like sickly Edward either, so the Tudor analogy is humorously selective.
Here is a little old diary juxtaposition:
’June 11, 1998
death is too much, too final… one moment and everything changes… You keep going over it: there: gone: there: gone…
June 19, 1998
My Dad eased from life to death: no fitting or terrible pain: gradually his breathing was slower, breaths far apart, then no breathing… It was hard to tell the moment when he stopped breathing.’
The best preparation and comfort for that moment, whether clearly cut or vaguely lingering, comes from the embrace of life. Which is why there was a heap of clothes on the riverbank earlier, and a partly dressed dragon conqueror making waves.
(I swam out to the Oak Dragon, climbed it, jumped off. Twice. Scary and fabulous as the best things often are.)
Art Nouveau
Day rolls lazily out of night’s blanket. It will only half open its eyes, so everything looks fogged and groggy.
Breakfast was decadent. The gold china was used. A cup and a crumbed plate sit in the sludgy light. This world is reflected in gold curves.
Now the sky is frosted glass, hills swoop in etched motifs.
Lying down, the cows seem unimpressed, but they have beautiful eyes.
At lunchtime, a scatter of showers patters the coast. Little Granddaughter holds my hand and we walk out too deep for trousers in the warm sea. We laugh, and we love the way the seaweed swirls.
Pivotal Poise
To represent a full cycle of natural rule, there is the Oak King, god of the waxing year, and the Holly King, god of the waning.
If there is a Sun King, he wears a fine cloud cloak for his longest day.
I like these annual pivots, whatever the weather.
In honour of the hours of day and night being at their extreme, therefore, some words:
Everything waxes before it wanes
Wanes before it waxes
It all flows and nothing is static
Acknowledge yourself here
At this point, under this sun
In the spiral of season, of experience
Ask for illuminated change
For a path lit:
Ask for the courage
To walk unlit:
Poised, as the year tilts
Facing fears, embracing love.
Girl And The Gang Of Friends
In Girl’s front room there are an unruly row of legs. Fake tan on a mitted hand makes bold strokes.
‘Is that too streaky?’ Girl peers.
Someone fetches another jug of Pimms, and there’s a false lash re-gluing session going on in a bedroom splattered with beauty debris.
‘I googled it,’ says the lady in the leopard print dress, of the look they are seeking for this evening’s theme. ‘Lots of black eyeliner.’
Outside it rains, which is the sworn enemy of glammed up hair. An arsenal of hairspray is lined up.
‘Are we doing your hair Mum?’ Girl’s friends ask in a kind of chorus. When Girl was only very small her and a gang of friends would frequently paint my face in unwittingly whorish glitter, tangle elastic bands in my hair. It was scoops of hooting fun.
I take a plastic cup of the Pimms and sit under the hairspray. I’m all ready laughing.
Journey Under The Moon
Important to note: that a fish, stranded, exhausted, flips on the shoreline, gasps for more life. It won’t worry about how it got there, only where it has to go.
If the gravity of the moon has called to the ocean in you, if it has swayed the emotive deep: that is a wave undeniable. Celestial it is: alien, since it ranges beyond human touch: yet we were born of stars, so it is part of us, part of our carbon based heritage. Sometimes we have such feeling, it reaches across space.
Full moon storm or full moon calm, wherever your incarnation has placed you: just as the fish knows it must be in the water, you know where your footprints should press a path.
Fifty Pegs
Yesterday morning, after a lazy run in hot mist, but before the shower is free, I am waiting for the 99p store to open: I need a new glasses case. I hope to come back to the car with this solo item. I have huge sunglasses on, there’s no case big enough for these. Also one giant t-shirt, ripped leggings, flip-flops: technically I’m still in the queue for the shower. Across the car park I see a lad sporting a grey suit; it looks new. He tucks his trousers into motorbike boots. A Massey Ferguson tractor pulls up, it has a trailer and two shiny trail bikes behind it. Squeals from the road, and the bob of balloons: an open topped bus full of frocked up girls rolls by. Ah! It’s the Leavers’ Day Parade! Aged 16, after 11 years of schooling, a rite of passage and celebration, quick: before the weariness of adulthood can grab them! The suits and the dresses and the modes of transport shimmer in the sun and everything is possible in those launching minds. May their energies carry them far and happy, land them somewhere where the view is as colourful as this.
I have a new case for my glasses now, and 50 wooden pegs. Two loads of washing dry on the line: after my shower, sit by the blow of bold cotton, under the blue sky, hot sun: cool grass sticks to my legs. I write notes for stories.
Aromatic
The kitchen smelt of elderflower, until the grill warmed to cook sausages, until the boiled water hit the coffee grounds.
Outside we ate breakfast, seated over new mown grass. A pink rose, open, bowed a stem.
Later, where there is a shallowing over the brown shaded rocks, the river was forded. An elder bouquet, plucked and fetched home.
A bucketful of perfumed, foamy flower heads stands ready for brewing.
Now, rose tea steams in the pot.
Sweet spiced vegetables simmer on a slow cook. Under the petal scents, too, mouthwatering fat-blobs linger in the grill pan.
Somewhere in the sky an aeroplane carries Boy away, from Heathrow to New Delhi.
Ten days to wait before we hear those stories. I can’t help but think of the market in Singapore, where the smeech of deep-frying ducks made his eyes water. We went to a café for breakfast then instead, went busily about our day. When we walked from an air conditioned shopping centre past a sizzle of food stalls he said in sweetly youthful innocence, with much feeling and fantastically clear diction: ‘I hate that Chinese smell!’
We have teased him about it ever since.
Bindflowers
Little Granddaughter says: ‘What’s that noise?’
Last week she said only: ‘Noise!’
Language grows like shining mystical bindweed, crawls around everything, confines, illuminates, defines, shadows.
(She still makes those silent movie star faces though.)
‘It’s the A30,’ Grandad says. ‘Cars, brmmm brmmmm.’
‘Oh, cars.’
Cars are soon forgotten. She finds a feather, and Dog has hair.
‘Doggle got hair,’ she informs. ‘Hair.’ She pulls her own strands, to demonstrate a connection.
‘Dog has hair all over. It’s called fur.’ Granma can be pedantic too.
‘Doggle fur. Teddy!’
Weeds are flowers that grow in places where they are not wanted. These words are not weeds: I think, language is a bindflower.
At the end of the green path, she launches the feather into a tree.
‘Wheeee feather! Bye!’ And having released it back into the wild, walks away up the stony path with the poise of a person who is greatly skilled.
Pros & Cons At The Halfway Glass House
At the end of the sixth month, the year is half done, or half und
one. The first phrase invokes either a mild panic- is everything planned achieved? Or a smugness: everything planned is achieved. I do love to tick off a good list: satisfying, yes: but a life with no room for surprise is tourniquet-ed.
Yesterday we came home late from a birthday party and the kitchen was dangerously pebbled with broken glass. The shelf above the Rayburn had lurched from its moorings. It was not planned, nor convenient, but we rose to the clearing challenge. Leaking over the floor was sterilizing fluid, not three gallons of lovingly crafted home brewed wine. Under the striking range of the shelf was one gold teacup, one bowl sized coffee cup and a floor: not any of us. The shelf will be re-pinned, its security re-planned, to be ready for the rest of the undone year.
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Soup By Volume Two Page 9
