Last Day Of My Fifties

Some Random blogs from our holiday........

7th October 2012 

Martel Lot/Dordogne SW France

Will be 60 tomorrow.

Misty rain all day  - a settled bleakness -  not cold but you still want to keep on your cardi.

Living in 2 dimemsions - here with my husband - eating strawberry jam with crisp croissants/courgettes, driving west under honey coloured rock face overhanging the road like a cave roof, towards Creysse, wandering round the town square lined with bric -a - brac stalls  dripping rain drops - the whole place a car boot sale, buying tomatoes and vanillla pods, on and on to Medieval Carennac and old churches and cobbled streets and a late horrid lunch - tasteless cheese pastry with salad drenched in strong dressing at a narrow cafe on the bend of the road - dirty and expensive. Home again and the bliss of reading on the sofa, late afternoon, while my husband walks towards Baladou from the path down the side of the house. 

This is the second dimension I’m living in -  always there in the shadow of my day - the book I’m reading -  Sarah Thornhill by Kate Grenville - set in Australia in 1860s - longing to pick it up again finish the story and not wanting it to end - stretching me twoways.....immersed in another time, another country but so alive and real in the way she writes it I think I’m there....

And accutely conscious it takes me up and away and out of my husband’s life - where he can’t share me any more - can’t read novels - can’t take himself away from his life like I can take my self away - away for a little while from the ALWAYS THERE  - the loss of him and us .....the closing in of his world like the roof of the cave getting lower and lower the further in we go  - into the honey coloured rocks of no memory...

So nearly 60 - with  my tummy round and full of our supper of garlicky  green beans and tomatoes, spinach and tuna pasta and little furrry rose red peaches their sweet flesh the colour of blood oranges and beetroots. My husband cracks open fresh wanuts and drinks red wine, while I cook to the strains of Mama Mia and the sky darkens on the last evening of my 50s......