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  • where I sit

    I sit in the garden of a church. In its quiet sleepy mornings. Later, in the afternoon heat. There’s always shade, on the grass, or on the cool stone steps lined with daisies that aren’t called daisies.

    I sit here and feel miserable, or calm. It’s best when how I feel doesn’t matter, but how the sky feels. I see the gentle bob of the flowers. The bend of the branches. Yesterday the gardener was here and she told me their secrets.

    One young tree was snapped in full bloom. Limb dense but not heavy with blossom, left to lay on the ground. That was some years ago now, she kept growing, her shape was just different for it.

    Across the way there was a beech, planted in 1915. For its hundredth birthday it got struck by lightening in the night, cracking all the way down its middle. But over the last six years, a sapling grew out of the rotting stump, and now it stands six feet tall.

    Another small tree has appeared dead for three years, but this spring she had the energy to wrap a pretty shawl of delicate white blossoms around herself, and then she changed into green.

    And there’s one tree that I know about for myself, without the soap scented gardening woman with white hair and an elegant grace telling me anything. That’s the oak standing tall as you can imagine. He greets me from the top of the road and I smile. I think he’s been there for 6 or 7 hundred years, which sounds almost impossible, because things of that age are excavated and kept in cases at museums. But he has been out here living and breathing the whole time. I knew the sun and fresh air was good for you. Sometimes I step through the low level plants and stand at the base of that oak. The dark soil is so soft against my bare feet and I lean in for a hug. My arm span is nothing to the circumference of that trunk. Leaning my weight into it, I feel the support of a wise, sturdy, kind old man. He knew this place when there were no buildings, roads. Just woodland and meadows.

    An acorn dropped by a parent tree, who saw back another thousand years. This brings me so much comfort. Because it shows that things can be stable and patient, in a world that has never felt that way to me.

  • strawberry sundae

    I want to write a blog. It’s a battle between two parts of me. One says, you shouldn’t write anything. Any words will be embarrassing, saying too much, letting secrets slide. Or they will be too poor, simple, empty. The other says, year after year goes by. You lock everything inside, maybe you don’t need to.

    there’s a windchime hung by a door across the street. It’s been here all the years I’ve lived here. Over a decade. When the summer wind visits, soft and steady, running like fingers through hair, the bells ring so gently you could miss them. I think I often do. But when I’m really here, so are they. I’m so grateful for that.

    Summer makes me nostalgic. With a blue sky as near constant, the breeze through the leaves outside my window. The slowness of long days. It’s the perfect set up to slip away. To fill the quietness with what was there once. Other summers. Difficult times, but now I just miss them. I miss my old hurt that sparkled with the jewels of people who were loving, inspiring. I’m quietly still in love with every kind soul I ever knew.

    strawberries are cooking on the stove, with powdered sugar and lemon juice, the air is so fragrant. For the past couple of weeks I’m making it a lot. To serve with vanilla ice cream. It reminds me of being 8 years old, pulling my mum’s handbag into the downstairs loo, pretty golden evening sunlight streaming through the frosted glass window. My heart would race as I would scoop my hand through the fine biscuit crumbs at the bottom, sifting for gold for the ice cream van. I couldn’t get enough of any of the sweet treats, but now it’s strawberry sundaes that stand out to me.

    I hope one day my life changes in a way where I don’t look back so much for comfort, because the comfort will be right with me.

    sorry if this wasn’t a blog post, but more like a journal entry. I don’t really know what a blog post should be. But it feels good to write something down anyway.