A Winter Job

The long tailed tits came back today briefly. I haven't seen them for a while. Such a delight.

Lovely visitors come today. Old friends. I cook them lunch. Mushroom and asparagus risotto, roasted carrots and squash, a medley of greens spiked with chilli....plum and apple crumble. 

It always grounds me...cooking for people I love...puts everything in perspective. My stomach and heart are calmer.

 I  spend the afternoon in the garden, in the sunshine, pulling up bindweed and pruning back the winter jasmine which is wild and rampant in the swimming pool border. When my gardener comes to cut the grass we make plans to clear the stream of all the old junk that is obstructing the flow at my boundary edge. He says it is a winter job.

My winter job is do another kind of clearing....let go of old judgements of myself...and to sit with all this pain and let it be...till I start to flow again.

And to make fires in my hearth...

Pain

I want it to be over. 

This pain.

Sharp in my heart.

Clogging my lungs.

Raw in my gut.

But it's not.

 And I just read this quote from Louise Hay.

"Love will always dissolve pain."

The day Before....

I haven't seen a sparrow on the bird feeder before.

They usually dive in to the seeds scattered on the table ...

and they are the only ones who use the ground feeder.

I only saw a robin briefly this morning hopping on the hand rail by the steps leading down to the swimming pool. 

It has been another glorious hot September day.

 A  single chestnut  fallen from the tree by the stream....my own chestnuts...amazing.

I looked up from my endless weeding this afternoon to see this lovely balloon floating above the silver birch trees....

I could hear the roar of the fire in the basket....

and I remembered the trip Robin and I took in  a hot air balloon over the fields near Honiton  a few years ago - a wedding anniversary gift from the family.

 I have been in and out of the garden all day.

It was a day as beautiful as this 32 years ago...the day before we got married...I spent most of it cooking quiches for my wedding breakfast...at a friend's house....and after each one I'd go out into her garden and have a cigarette and a black coffee in the sunshine. And cry a bit with tiredness and overwhelm and the emotion of it all.

And much later that evening I remember cutting Robin's hair at the table in my sister's farmhouse kitchen....I was staying with my parents and he was staying with his and I think his mother disapproved of us seeing each other the night before our wedding!

26th September 2015 with one of our sweet great nieces.

26th September 2016.

I have been aching all day with remembrance....missing him so much.

Pottering ....and yet another decision

 It's a rare and lovely blue sky and warm sunny autumn day. A magical gift of a day.

I spend  all of it in the garden....planting up the big pots with winter jasmine, honeysuckle,  mahonia, solarnum and agapanthus....digging out the weeds in the cracks between the slabs around the swimming pool...getting two loads of washing nearly dry.... including a table cloth and two Portuguese  white cotton rugs.....

eating my soup lunch in the sun watching the birds.

Just pottering. Till I'm so tired I can hardly stand. Still finding it hard to believe this is my garden, my home now.

Feeling lucky. Feeling blessed.  

I'm having a horrid frustrating time with the camera and the photos...taking ages to upload onto the computer ....won't upload onto the blog...then suddenly inexplicably they do .. but only some of them.

I have been to Jessops in Exeter and talked to nice woman there - it seems from my description to her that the sensor in my camera may be failing which would explain why the photos aren't so good any more. So it's not just me.

 The question is to repair it ( costly /no guarantee) or replace it?

 Yet another decision to make in my ever increasing list of decisions.

Just want someone to tell me what to do....but that's not going to happen.

Even if they did I'd still change my mind....or do nothing at all. 

Sometimes that can be a good strategy....

Healing me heals them....

Saturday - very soggy.

 I drive to Buckfastleigh...stop at the beautiful Buckfast Abbey on the way 

to Dean Forge Showroom.... to buy a wood burner stove for the sitting room.

  I chose one that I had decided on before from the catalogue...had lots of advice from nice sales manager...was about to buy it and saw this one ...changed my mind and ordered it instead. That's the way it is at the moment ....my decision making process is erratic to say the least.

Sunday  - started off soggy but turned into beautiful day.

I walk with lovely group of friends in the damp Somerset countryside.

We all bring lunch to share afterwards. Although I don't eat meat I made this Chicken Cacciatore...Italian  hunters' stew - very rich with tomatoes and herbs, mushrooms and olives. I had to borrow a big Le Creuset casserole dish from a friend  as it was for 15 people.

 I used to have one myself when I cooked quantities of vegetarian stews  - in the days of "Magic Meals" - my veggie catering business. Le Creuset and business both long since gone.

Luckily there was a fab Cranks Moussaka for the vegetarians and

 wonderful desserts  - as well as a brioche pudding and fruit salad there was this cardamon and rose water Middle Eastern cake and a melt in the mouth

blackcurrant tart.  Needless to say I don't  eat supper.

 Today.

The sunrise. It's cold for the first time when I wake up...I  need to find my warm slippers...especially for the quarry tiles on the kitchen floor.

 This afternoon, after my therapy session, I sit on the bench  with a bowl of miso and rice soup,with the constant bubble of the stream behind me...

the sun so warm on my face...

and let it all sink in ...the insights from the session...that I am stronger than I think...that I'm laying the ground to let go of my fear of loss ( which constantly twists my gut) my  fear of being abandoned, all the inherited grief which goes way back into my ancestral heritage. ...that it no longer serves my soul.

And that I have conflated two ideas...I'm without Robin and I'm on my own. I haven't really assimilated the truth that I'm without Robin....I need to do that first before I can contemplate the thought that I am without Robin but it doesn't necessarily mean being on my own. 

 Can't get my head around that yet. So I sit with a new affirmation instead,

" I trust my own inner strength. I trust I can heal."

I can do it for me ...for my nephews and nieces...for future generations.... and for my ancestors....healing me heals them.

And tonight the full moon is as bright

 and white

 and shining

as the shell home

 of a horse chestnut.

Ready to be broken open

like me.

I follow the sun....

All the good things about today...in the vicinity of my house...

All day....

  I follow the sun around the sitting room as it floods in from different angles, different windows.  

Mid morning....

 I  turn a chair towards the double doors onto the garden, sit with the sun on my face, my feet  curled under me, listen to a Matt Kahn video about how to recover from fear and sadness..... he says you need to rest and sit and breathe.  I manage it for a few minutes.

Lunch time....

I sit with the sun coming onto to my back through the side window and eat my bowl of soup.

Mid afternoon tea....

I sit on the sofa again with a dear friend who helps me choose a wood burner stove and we talk about slate hearths and oak beam mantles.

This evening... 

The sun still slanting in though the front window I sit in the big armchair - I always think of it as Robin's chair - and talk on the phone to my sister.

 Too much sitting... so I take my camera and walk out into the blustery wind, up the lane, and over the fields and back down into the village with the sun beginning to sink in the west behind the trees.

                  And let the beauty of it all sink into my skin as I walk home thinking about supper.