This evening my husband comes home with a tiny bunch of sweet-peas from the allotment. Their perfume is gorgeous. They are very precious as I expect they are the first and last - this year the plants didn't grow properly. Unlike the blackcurrants which have dripped off the bushes in long necklace strands of dusky pearls. The fridge is stuffed with them - waiting for me to turn them into jam and compote and ice cream. But I don't know when I'm going to have time to do it....
I couldn't face it this afternoon when I left my dear sisters and all that remains of our parents' stories scattered on tables in the studio at my sister's farm. I felt hollowed out by ordering and identifying and weeding out all the photos - black and white, sepia and colour - going back five generations into our family. And after all that we still couldn't find the old shoe box (or is it an album?) stuffed with all the small precious photos of us as children growing up in the nineteen forties and fifties with our parents, our cousins our aunts and uncles - in cots and prams and gardens, playing and picnicking on rugs spread out on red African earth.
Not sure why I'm so churned up by all this.....more endings I suppose..... and there is a context for my sisters who are grandmothers now and have a reason to keep these memories for the next generation of little people.....who one day may want to trace back where they came from and wonder about their ancestors.
Maybe it's just that I can't find anywhere to settle at the moment.....the past missing in a shoebox somewhere, the future too unbearable to contemplate and the present un-lived, always blotted with that Sunday night feeling....the dread of school tomorrow.....
It was my mother's birthday today - she loved sweet peas. I'd like my great nephews and nieces to know that about her...so maybe I'll tell them one day - or write them a letter.....
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