Miracles, Gifts, Opportunties

A quote from Robert Holden - 

Today is just another normal day ....full of miracles gifts and opportunities.

This gorgeous orchid on my kitchen window sill was a gift from Robin's family.

Two  coincidences /miracles today......

meeting a dear friend by chance in a shop neither of us often visit.

Crossing texts with a dear friend on unrelated matters at the exact moment ....when we haven't been in touch for several weeks.

I'm awake most of the night with the moon. My head full of ideas for house improvements/designs.

I forget most of them during the day....dazed with tiredness.

And I think about the opportunities I may have missed in this quote from Norman Cousins.

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.

Missed but not too late ....as BJ Miller says in his interview in The Daily Good this week..

A grieving process is where your relationship with what you just lost sets up how you live on, and love on.

Still grieving.....and healing.

   

....surrender to the cave.

This morning I wake to rising mist over the valley and a hard hoar frost

on the ground. Even the water in the bird baths 

is glassy frozen.

Unusual to see a coal tit

at the bird feeder...and

even more unusual - a land surveyor in the garden. Actually three of them have been here all day measuring the house and the buildings and land around the house.

They will make drawings and elevations of all they have surveyed and give them to the architect who will use them to make the first sketches.

And so it will begin.....this transformation....from old house to new home.

The light on the trees in my neighbours' gardens is shining bright this evening ...

the sheep under the spreading plane tree, beginning to lose its leaves, don't seem to notice...

but both the silver birch trees have turned to bronze gold in the last few days. Out of the sun it has been icy cold and when I came home this evening and park the car I noticed that all the dahlias and nasturtiums have been stung by the frost...their leaves blackened and curling at the edges. 

The beginning of the garden's transformation.... autumn into bare earth winter.

While the men are here today with their measuring equipment, in and out of the house, I find it hard to settle to anything so I make a big pot of pale green leek and potato soup... and a stew using up the last of the green beans and garden tomatoes  -  the last time I'll cook that dish this year ...and I roast hard chunks of beetroot and carrots for supper.....

to comfort myself in the newly dark afternoons since the clocks changed. 

Already I can feel my winter hibernation coat calling me to surrender to the cave.

Becalmed

Saturday night...

Sunday morning....

and the drop in temperature has halted the invasion of black flies

and ladybirds ...they have been swarming against my windows for days.

We didn't have time to throw rose petals into the sea on Robin's anniversary, 

so on Sunday I stood on the little wooden  bridge over my stream

and released them into the water, which doesn't flow very fast, so they gathered

like soft papery jewels in the green corners of the banks,

waiting for a stronger current to float them onward.

More glistening jewels brightening my usual circular field  walk...

late cherries

and rowan berries( maybe?)....

and the clouds are

especially 

spectacular....

autumn dropping all around me.

I've been in indulging in  a"no plans" day

letting tasks fall off my TO DO list

 like dry leaves

catching in the wind

and 

allowing  myself 

 to meander with the 

 rose petals

stopping to 

observe my surroundings - 

the sparrows chittering on the bird table - 

my aloneness -

becalmed

in the cold air 

of my house,

resting 

my mind.

Too Much for a Heart to Hold

Flowers from the garden on the kitchen windowsill....

my view  this evening  when I'm washing up..

the moon last night ...swimming in the bird bath.

So it's true then.

Or so they tell me.

You have gone.

Forever.

No coming back.

I know it.

Because you aren't here.

So now I have to let my heart know it.

From the very beginning when 

the consultant said,

'It is Semantic Dementia'

I didn't believe it.

Not really 

not that you would  die

not soon anyway

not for a long 

undefined length of  time

only in some vague 

future. 

But we still had now

and now 

and now.

The hell of now.

Not knowing it would be 

beyond hell

 in the end.

But  that now is over.

Not vague any more.

Not just 2 years over.

Today I shock myself

did I really not believe it?

Living deep in the onslaught 

 of all those years

but not really believing it.

Too much for a heart to hold.

And still now

I live in a kind of hope

I don't know what for...

that if I still wear your ring

still  wrap myself in this illusion, 

this fantasy

that it could  be like it was,

before you were ill

even though that 

wasn't  exactly a bed of roses.

That if I still

 grieve for what we can never have now,

that somehow

  it will protect me 

from the raw

gut twisting 

truth.

You have gone 

and even if you were here 

it would not be good.

For you 

or me.

Too much to digest 

in one great eight year

 gulp.

 So like the dreaded goat's milk kefir 

which

I disguise with banana,

I can remember 

and forget 

in equal portions

till I get more accustomed 

to the taste 

of the

 final

 truth.

Holding

 Still more photos on my long walk last week....and the sky is still this blue today.

 This morning  2 lovely plumbers come to remove small hand basins  (one avocado green, the other soft peach a la 1970s chic) and related boxed-in pipework in 2 bedrooms.

They hardly make any mess - just leave pink re-plastered basin shapes in the walls and re- fitted unpainted skirting boards.

I'm too tired to put all furniture and my things back in place, so tonight I sleep without curtains. Which doesn't make much difference as the moonlight floods in through the thin fabric anyway and only owls of the night can see in though the windows.

This afternoon lovely therapist says she can  feel how my body holds on, holds tight, holds still, holds back.....holds it all together.....waiting for it to be over.

And how there was nothing holding me from the very beginning ..... the tiny me needed to be  held...and it's this holding I long for now....

to rest into angel wings at my back....which hurts so much with all the trying to stay upright ...... holding myself together. 

Broken hearts are messy enough as it is.