Harvest Sun

18th August 2011 Thursday

Wednesday

We leave London at dusk and drive west into a huge sky painting the clouds shell pink and gold with the brush of the melting harvest sun. We don’t stop once. The car steams up with Beethoven’s opera, Fidelio, at full choral volume. My husband sings along at the rousing bits and all the way home I let my tiredness leak away and think about the dear people we have stayed with these last few days. And I feel full up with friendship and talking and a wonderful birthday Mezze meal - still tasting the sweet smokiness of a triumphant Babaganoush in my memory.

Thursday

Wake up to drizzling rain and cold feet. And thudding pneumatic drills in the street outside our windows. All day I can’t shake the feeling of bleakness in my bones. I buy huge orange tomatoes in the market called Brandy Wine. And take back a cardigan I bought last week which is a muddy caramel pink and which looked a pale burnt ochre in the shop. And definitely doesn’t suit me. I put the heating on to dry the damp washing draped around the house. We have a mushy avocado salad for lunch which leaves me cold inside. Across the table my husband looks miserable. He says he’s feeling incompetent at the allotment - the pear laden tree falling down.

At my father’s I find a nearly full bottle of eye drops in the waste paper bin. He couldn’t see that it wasn’t empty. He says he’s forgetting things more and more as well.

He says, ‘ Everything is a bit fuzzy. I want to shake my head to make it all clear.’

I say, ‘Do you mean fuzzy in your eyes or in your head?’

‘Both’, he says, and we laugh. There isn’t really anything we can do about it.

Tonight I finally warm up in the company of a dear circle of friends and the magical sound of the Moola Mantra melts me like yesterday’s harvest sun, sinking into my bones.