Writing Sanctuary | Day Three

 

Responses to Beth Kempton’s prompts for SWEETENING

I am sitting in the old workshed. Tinny clashes echo from the Bakehouse nearby. The chickens are loud today, asking to be fed. 

In a few minutes, before I begin today’s practice, we will feed them and give them a little check over.

S’s feet crunch on the gravel path back to the house.

It is peaceful.

The desk welcomed me this morning. 

I sat a while and watched the chickens, happy scratching through their bounty of scraps.

My mind more empty this morning, observing. 

I like this daily ritual, of waking and questioning myself, sounding out how I feel and unfolding the day in the way that feels right.

This morning when troubled thoughts rose to the surface and tried to settle, I remembered my thinking that these low times as I wake are like a mist that will rise as the day wakes with me. Today the mist lay over a meadow, and the thoughts tumbled and scattered like rabbits, dawn light pinking their ears. They ran from my noticing and hid.

A pale, delicate, long-legged spider is walking an invisible web in the window.

I can hear the breeze, and look up to the leaves shimmying and trembling. Gold and green. Ballerina hands responding to the music of the wind.

Their shadows dance on my arms, shifting spots of light brighten my skin. For a moment I’m a creature from another world, ethereal, glowing with shifting golden scales. I pause to bathe in them and revel in the idea of light carried with me, in me, on me.

S is ready. Chickens, and then I will begin.

. . .

~ DAILY SPARKS ~

Have You Ever

My mother’s amber was fly paper hanging in spirals twisting from the ceiling in the kitchen. Shifting gold, speckled with dark spots to mark the place insects blundered into sacrifice. Their lives for the greater good. A wing sometimes, or just a leg. Can a fly fly on without a leg? Or did they tumble to the floor; dust to dust?

My mother’s amber was jewellery, warm and full of promise, brought out from lavender-scented velvet-lined nooks for special times when amethyst was not the thing. I seem to remember smooth even drops but she didn’t like to dangle so perhaps that is some other amber i have seen, on different ears. And soon before she died, she passed on round globes of amber to my daughter. I wonder what became of them?

\ \

Black Balloon

So I thought straight away about that shift, that paradox, that quantum leap we almost never quite completely make from believing our mother to be the centre of all things. 

I was tied to her, floating balloon-like at her centre, tucked beneath her heart.

And even now she’s gone, that binding thread remains, strong as cobweb, invisible, forgotten until it catches, clings, and brings me back.

. . .

Responding to the invitation to write about lost things ― 

:

1.) shortening

Mine blanket was huge and yellow and I still feel the visceral loss of it. The absence of comfort. The conviction that it had been stolen or they hadn’t looked hard enough to find it. 

For how could it possibly be lost when it went everywhere with me?

Looking back now, as a parent so much older than my parents were then, I suspect a well-intentioned move to wean me off the huge yellow mucky thing that tied me to infant-hood way longer than it should. Suspicious because it was at my mother’s best friend’s house that the blanket was last seen.

They tried to stop the wailing with my father’s jumper but blanket it must be and in the end an acceptable substitute was found. Creamy-white instead of yellow, and a much more manageable size. I hated it being taken away for washing but I loved it when it was back smelling clean and of the garden air, somehow soft and crisp at once, the silky ribbon on the edge so smooth against my lip.

Ma always threatened to sew it into my wedding dress. But when it came to it we neither of us remembered. I wonder if she even knew I still had it.

One day, after she died and grief collapsed me, I found it and held it and it was like being held.

\ \

2.) drawing out what is beautiful

Mine blanket went everywhere with me. I hated it being taken away for washing but I loved it when it was back smelling of the garden air, somehow soft and crisp at once, the silky ribbon on the edge so smooth against my lip.

Ma always threatened to sew it into my wedding dress — though when it came to it we neither of us remembered. I wonder if she even knew I still had it.

One day after she died and grief collapsed me, I found it and held it and it was like being held.

\ \

3.) shaping one fine sentence 

I still hold that weeping, devastated child inside — and she’s the one unleashed by all new loss.

. . .

Today’s Person from Porlock : The chickens

A glass of water, a sliver of ham

A call from Angelina Ballerina

Messages from J__ and memories of Cornwall

Hanging the washing ― and making it rain

Gathering turtle, house, hydrangea, pegs, scent

Fetching red pen, reading glasses

. . .

A quiet hunger is calling me back to the house for ham and cold potatoes and frilled curls of lettuce.

The shed has felt like home.