After 4 days ...And after 4 Weeks

4th August 2018 in my new home.

It is 3:55 AM.

I am awake and weeping.
The sky is moonlit pale beyond my curtain-less windows.
It is the deathly quiet before dawn.

My fore arms are sore scratched from wrenching out brambles entwined with ivy in the front hedge.
My ankles are burning from yanking up stinging nettles choking the old garage doors which are rusting and peeling white paint. 

My mind won’t rest, still heated with the talking and the arguing and the explaining -
a woman in India on the other end of the phone line
telling me I won’t have BT Internet for two days until the engineer will come on Monday. Maybe.

But Monday is too late I need it now.
Like they say,
“You will get used to your new house in the country. In time.
It will become your home.
You'll see..... you will love it.”

But right now, deep in this haunted moonlit hour I don’t love it.
It is someone else’s life I am camping in,
till I can go home.

And tomorrow which is already today, I will get up and light incense sticks of Patchouli and Jasmine to mask the smell of dog in my carpets. Like I have done for the last four mornings.

I will draw the new IKEA curtains in the sitting room and kill the small moths that flutter out of them.

I have learnt to squash them with a tea towel against the wall. It leaves a small brown smear on the woodchip wallpaper, stained with blue tack blobs.

I will open the narrow glass door in the snug and let out the black flies, the daddy longlegs, the wasps and the stunned hornets that have been battering against the panes all night.

In the kitchen I will open several cupboards trying to remember which one holds the refill teabags.

While the kettle boils I will stand at the window and gaze at the brown and white cows browsing in the field beyond the brook which is lined with straggly dead grass and nettles and the orange red blobs of cuckoo pint.

 

Wondering why I gave up my safe and familiar  home.

And hoping to see a sweet robin land on the bird table.Like the one who flitted in yesterday briefly,  just for a second, the young one with ruffled head feathers and an eager pecking beak.

I have had no other small bird visitors.

Later I will pull on my wide-brimmed sun hat
and put on my widest smile
and I will walk down the lane to the street market -
the once a year big family event in the village where everyone knows everyone else.
There will be food stalls and flower stalls and music and a tug o’war outside the pub.

 I will greet the neighbour I met yesterday, also a widow, from Harpenden in Hertfordshire, near where we lived for 10 years.

She will be selling tea and cakes in the Methodist Church. Already we have talked of Methodism and she said to me,

'You are Merfyn Temple‘s daughter?
I heard my parents talk of him often.'

  I will meet another kind neighbour who called round last evening with a welcome hessian bag, heavy with home-made plum jam, a foil wrapped parcel of warm chocolate brownies, a paper bag of lime green and rose red apples from her tree. She teaches in the same school as a friend of mine in Exeter.

I will meet the two estate agent friends who sold my Victorian house for me ...our 15-year-old home ....who cheered me on to buy this modern, shabby one with its vast acreage of garden.

Maybe I will bump into the man who rode on my petrol lawnmower yesterday - cutting my wild lawns, scattering the white stems of dead bluebells covering the sloping bank outside the kitchen. They were in full bloom in the spring when I first saw the house. And fell in love with it. 

 I have yet to meet his wife and their dog. But when I do I will be the cheerful newcomer and smile my smile. 

And no one will see the dark aching fissure in my chest ,
the widow’s chasm that never gets any smaller or softer for lighter.

However much I try and fill it up
with the brightness and blessings
of my future.

I wrote that a month ago.

Today I have been painting again. The stairs and landing. I've already painted the bathroom and the spare room, covering up the woodchip wallpaper - the acid yellow of it - with the thick cream of Dulux Timeless white. Just cleaning with paint. A temporary solution,  helping me to breathe more easily while I dream up plans for knocking down walls and bringing the garden into the house with more windows and more light.

I'm still unsettled. I still wake and weep in the early hours. Sometimes.

I fill my days with things to do. In the house and in the garden.

To make myself believe I'm really here and not there. In that other life I had.

But watching the blue tits, the sparrows and the robin hustling at the bird feeder from my kitchen window and

feeding my lovely visitors who bring smiles and gifts and encouragement....they are all helping me to find a more natural, less urgent path through this unfamiliar terrain.

Tomorrow I will write about the unexpected blessing and gift of my rickety bench by the stream.