Blackberry Crumble For A One Hundred Year Old Aunty

Nearly every day my husband brings back another punnet of blackberries from the allotment.

They turn this colour when you cook them with sugar..

 Like the colour of this Acer tree gracing the beautiful gardens at Killerton House,

where we walked this evening  - a sharp wind blowing, blurring my photos -  a sad end-of-summer feeling threading through the fading herbaceous borders....

I spent this morning in the kitchen - roasting tomato quarters with basil and garlic and making two blackberry and apple crumbles. One for Sunday -  lunch with friends after sharing a family constellation. And one for tomorrow -  to take to a party in Weston -Super- Mare in honour of my amazing aunty who is 100 years old. Still gracing her huge extended family with the brightness of her blue eyes and the unfailing kindness of her heart.

Wine and Chocolate

Random photos from my files.....I like the alpaca's long soft eyelashes, the natural shape and silveriness of the tree stump, the white arteries of the cabbage, the icy lace of the wave breaking....

Do you want a glass of wine, by any chance? my husband asks me before supper tonight.

No, I've got a headache. 

I didn't sleep much last night.

I've been getting worried about how much wine he's drinking recently. Maybe I should be more worried about how much chocolate I'm eating recently - Lindt Dark Mint especially -  and those Magnum mini ice creams in the freezer that I keep for easy desserts for my husband but I eat them too....

I've been thinking about one of Robert Holden's quotes in his daily inspiration emails - 

Have you noticed that what you try to control the most causes the most conflict.

You can't be in control and happy.

So much to learn.....so much to change ......so much to surrender.....it's enough to drive me to the freezer.....

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.

Blue Sky World

Bank-holiday weekend .....keeping away from the crowds on the beaches.

We  head out to Dartmoor and walk along the river Dart lined with arching beech trees....

Waterfall  -  a white-toothed comb at Fingle Bridge...

Blackberries - ripening....

Dartmoor and rowan....

Rowan and bracken....

Sunday supper - sweetcorn, grilled courgettes and allotment tomatoes....

 Summer returns - bank holiday Monday at Knightshayes Court near Tiverton - thank you, National Trust.

Leaping topiary hedge-dog in beautiful gardens surrounding the house....

 This afternoon a late summer rose still rambling in our garden....

On Saturday we return to a picnic spot we found last time we did this long walk  - in the shade of a huge oak tree with a wonderful view of the Dart valley below us and Castle Drogo - wreathed in scaffolding and white plastic sheeting -  high on the hill beyond. After our Brie and egg mayonnaise salad picnic I say I'd like to take my shoes off, lie back on my cagoule ( in the absence of a picnic rug) and just rest a bit. My father would have called it taking 40 winks.

My husband would prefer to keep going. He asks me how long I'll be. I don't want to put a limit on it but I've learned that he likes more certainty around time than he used to. 

Why don't you have a wander, I say. I want at least 5 minutes.

I close my eyes against the brightness of the afternoon. I can hear my husband near by - feel him waiting for me....After 5 minutes he comes back with a cluster of blackberries in his open palm and a big smile.

Look what I've found, he says, offering them to me - a prize.

Shall we go now?

Yes, I say. Although I could have stayed there forever under the shelter of that giant oak tree, the warm silk air on my skin, looking up beyond the branches...and pretend for a bit longer that everything was normal and I had all the time in the world.....and an unlimited future -  blue and clear as the sky above me....

Upside Down

Upside down in South West France.

Another bombshell goes off in my world today ...... turning everything upside down..... an unexpected tax bill wiping out the next four months money we planned to live on.....and I also feel torpedoed by the reality of the slow relentless march of my husband's disease..... 

On the news tonight we watch reports about the bombs in the north and south of Lebanon. Later I read my niece's blog from Beirut - she says there was an incident in a nearby neighbourhood which turned out to be a false alarm....

But the bombs and the possibility of death and injury are real in her world, in her street, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Egypt, in Jordan.....in all those places where fear is wiping out peace.....

The fallout from the bombs in my world is only dangerous if I let fear rule everything and forget the purpose of Love....which I did today - forget. How lucky I am to have another chance......tomorrow.....to start by lifting my head and face what's in front of me, however scary, with Love behind me -  like a wall....

Swallowing The Sun

What was your day like?

Like this.

7.15 - no time for Morning  Pages - choose to do yoga exercises for my sciatica instead and meditate lying down with two tennis balls in a sock under my head.....2 birds with one stone...

8.15 Drive across town to collect husband from garage where he has left his car for a service....

Whizz up breakfast smoothie with spinach, ginger and lemon and turn it muddy murky with black-currants and blackberries for big vitamin C hit.....

9.30 Lovely woman from Age UK arrives to be with husband for three hours - they go off to the canal with paints and paper and an easel which he bought from Lidl on special offer last week. It's already hot... the sun burning my neck.....

I go mad in town at  the organic farmers' market and fill my baskets with fresh sweetcorn cobs, ripe fat tomatoes, long purple aubergines, sugar snap peas, pungent basil leaves, pale mauve shallots, dusty radishes, heavy little gem lettuces, boxes of eggs and slabs of smoked haddock and cod.

In the post office I send a pack of photos to Armenia and a memory stick of photos to Surrey.... buy prawns in Sainsbury's for husband's lunch.

12 noon - Back home I take a call from the accountant  - he wants me to edit a letter he's sending to HMRC re mitigating circumstances concerning why husband didn't pay tax on his benefits to prevent a penalty.....he describes husband's brain condition. Hope it will cover it.....

Make chilli mayo prawn salad for husband's lunch and leave house in time to meet dear friend back in town for mushroom frittata salad lunch. We share a wedge of vegan chocolate cake which is dark and light and sweet with a sticky icing....then walk to the cinema.

3.30 We watch a film about Tibet called  'When the Dragon Swallowed the Sun' - there is a warning at the beginning  - Contains grizzly scenes.... After two hours I'm overwhelmed by despair and sadness at the absolute hopelessness of the possibility of Tibet ever being returned to its peaceful status pre 1945 when it was occupied by the Han Chinese....

6.30 Feel drained and lie on bed ... husband comes back from his ceramics class and brings me  a cup of tea then drives us to our Deeksha Meditation evening....

Everyone is there -  every chair taken up  -  I feel so blessed and grateful and tearful for all the love and healing in the room....the music always takes me back to India where my sister and I learned about Deeksha in 2008 ...when my mother was so ill.....so it all gets mixed up with that time before she died.....

8.45  We leave before the tea and flapjacks as I can't shake off this bone tiredness  .....husband makes the scrambled eggs and toast from dear friend's homemade rye bread....  and I put two huge sweetcorn cobs into a pan of boiling water....

After our supper he plays a game of Sudoku on the computer and I catch up with Celebrity Master Chef on iplayer....

And now it's nearly midnight....I said I'd write a quick blog but my husband knows I won't and says  See you when I see you....which is now ..... except I think he's asleep.

Cry Me a River

The seafront at Exmouth tonight after most of the holiday makers have gone home leaving the beach for the seagulls - and our footprints in the sand.

That song "Cry Me A River" has been running through my head all afternoon.  We eat our salad lunch in the garden. Then my husband says,

I'm going to have a lie down and go to ceramics later.

He says he's tired after all the emotions that came up in our session with our new clinical psychologist this morning. Feeling the loss of his life as he expected it to be... and the fear of losing my love....

Wednesday afternoons I think of as my time off  -  treasured, longed for, waited for, precious -  three  whole hours for me while he makes his weird and wonderful creatures at Unearth Studio. So when he says he's not going till later I feel like a child who has had her ice-cream taken away, her birthday party cancelled......

But I know that the river of tears that flows, in great snotty hiccups, bawled into tissues so that he doesn't hear me, isn't about losing an hour of my Wednesday afternoon....but losing all of it....my husband, word by word......the life I thought I had, slice by slice.

 Nearly three years on since those words Semantic Dementia broke up our world.....is it really only now that I'm feeling it - really in my core....what the deep earth must know when the fracking starts?

But it's also from that core that I can grasp that this isn't happening to me - although it feels like a tsunami - but I am happening to it.....moment by moment choosing to float or drown in the same wave.

 And ever since I can remember I've been able to swim like a dolphin.... and keep my eyes open under water.

I'll Climb Under The Desk

  

Avocado and Tomato Bruscetta - lunch of my dreams....

I sit with a sweet young man at my husband's desk and he talks me through how to set up internet banking on my computer. I feel wrung out after nearly 2 hours but now I know how to access at least three of our accounts.  So that I'll be able to do it when at some point in the future my husband won't be able to.

The same young man sorts out the problem of my husband's speakers - says he needs new ones. He shows us the little green socket to plug them into at the back of the hard drive. My husband goes to PC World and buys portable speakers which don't fit. He doesn't know what a PC is. Or what a socket is. 

After lunch we take them back and replace them with ones that fit. I say,

 I'm smaller than you so I'll climb under the desk and connect them. 

In the end we do it together and now he can hear his music and the recording of the choir he sings in which he loves and plays a lot.

I feel drained by all this climbing....climbing these new mountains of technology which I hate. It's not really the technical stuff that I have to learn it's finding a way to slide down the slope of acceptance...... that I need to do stuff -  gracefully -  that my husband used to do easily .....and that resenting it just makes it steeper.

It turns out that walking up steep hills would be very good for me......says the man with the magic hands who diagnoses the nagging pain in my right hip as sciatica -  coming from inflamed nerves in the lower vertebrae of my back.

And as a dear friend reminds me - sciatica is all about frustration - about not being able to go where you want.... or move forward.....or move at all.....without pain.

A Brass Band, A River Walk - A Late Summer Weekend

Military Brass Band playing in the market square in Bridport on Saturday in the pouring rain. I love it that the woman in the front row brought along her baby who slept through all the banging and clashing and trumpeting....

My husband joined in so enthusiastically that the band master asked him to conduct one the numbers which made him a great hit. A great hit for me was the lunch we had afterwards to get out of the rain at Lalu's -  haddock fish cake on watercress with chunky tartar sauce - simple, fresh, generous, good value, good service, good atmosphere - a gem! Oh, and the best warm melting chocolate brownie I can ever remember ....next time I'll have one all to myself instead of sharing it with my husband...

 On Sunday we walked by the coppery brown River Dart, here overhung with oak trees.

A dead branch floating in the shallows.....oak leaves underwater...

The rooty path following the river at New Bridge.

The shady gate we leaned on ...sun shimmering on the weedy field beyond....

Rowan tree - berries bright as a military band uniform jacket....

Back home my husband plays game after game of Sudoku on the computer and I sink into late night  TV watching...two films which he can't follow. We are finding our own separate ways of escaping .....trying to put time on hold till the busyness or emptyness of Monday comes round again. 

Japan and Jugs, Lunch and Love

We are three for lunch today in honour of our Japanese friend who is visiting from Tokyo - Roasted Root Veggie Frittata from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's fantastic cook book called VEG. In this case all the veggies are from the allotment - beetroots, carrots, potatoes, red onions, yellow pattipan squash and garlic, lots of of fresh herbs chopped into the eggs and parmesan cheese grated on top.

Salad - raw peas ( my sister's) and the first sweetcorn from the market - always reminds me of the first time I learned how to slice the kernels from their cobs - making a salad together with a dear friend in London many years ago.

My most favourite Middle Eastern dish of all time which doesn't look exciting, but I never ever get tired of it, could eat it every day especially made with the short season red and orange Brandy-Wine tomatoes from the market - simply called Green Beans Tomatoes and Garlic.

The sun this evening, lighting up the candle and begonia centrepiece on the table after she left.

 Gift from Tokyo - Japanese cookies - tiny, delicate, beautifully wrapped.

Jugs - just because I love them.

It's three years since I've seen my dear Japanese friend ....... my father was still alive ( he introduced us) .....and our pussy cat.....and it was before my husband's diagnosis. She sits with him at the keyboard in his office and they play a duet - he improvises - she says he's really talented. She says he's still the same and wouldn't  have noticed any difference if I hadn't told her. Except he can't remember the word for duck but he does know that Belfast is in Northern Ireland but not where Tokyo or Japan is....

She says many women  in Japan endure loveless marriages and divorce isn't common. She also works at three different universities  -  long, long hours and at weekends. It makes me so grateful  for everything I have in my life - whatever I've lost.......and how loved I feel....and how bleak and  pointless it would all be without that.

Lion's Breath

There is a pose in yoga called The Lion Breath where you put your hands on your bent knees, open your mouth and roar like a lion from the bottom of your lungs. A dear friend recommends I practise this. Do more roaring.

Today I wanted to roar down the phone at the woman from the Department of Work and Pensions for sending a letter with the wrong figures - yet again - regarding the taxable allowance on my husband's benefits. Not her fault, different person of course, so I didn't. And in the end I could have jumped down the phone and kissed her because she promised she'd send the right figures and even addressed the envelope and said it would be in the post tonight. 

I wanted to roar at my husband tonight for letting the poached eggs boil over and fusing the cooker and the TV and the hob -  yet again.   But I didn't. I switched it all back on in the fuse box under the stairs and grumbled at him and nearly wept with frustration. And loved him for making the stringy white mess into scrambled eggs instead.

 It's no good roaring AT people you have to roar into the air, and let the wind snatch it away - all that rage and despair  - let the waves pound it into surf. Much better  dissolving there than crippling the bones in your hips, poisoning your loved one with blame......