Wednesday 28 August 2013

Harvest/ NearlyDrowning/ Hope in the Drought













 




Late August harvest - our first plums  -  some wasp-stung or pink worm-riddled, more tomatoes, and this morning I collected five apples fallen from the tree, cut out the cankered cores and juiced the rest.

All day I've been swimming in the deep paper sea of our finances, following the underwater trail of tax returns and income and expenditure..... nearly drowning, clinging on to the reassuring raft of my sister  as I'm knocked back by wave after wave of letters and emails and bills and phone calls.... She says it's not as bad as I feared....but I'm still left with a sinking, sickening feeling that I should have taken this on sooner.....entered my husband's domain sooner.....before he started drowning too....

And I keep remembering a phrase a dear friend used to quote to me....

It's only money - not drops of blood....

Tonight for supper I escape into the comfort of penne pasta and drown it in a sweet tomato and leek sauce, papery shavings of parmesan and gold coins of yellow courgette. 

Later we watch the film on TV about Martin Luther King and the civil rights march on Washington 50 years ago.
 My husband asks who's Martin Luther King?....who is JFK? But he cries in the scenes where people are clubbed with batons, where children are hosed by water cannon, when Bob Dylon sings Blowing in the Wind, when Mahalia Jackson's voice rains on the crowd of 200 thousand like hope in a drought.........feeling it all with his wide open, naked heart.




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