Spattered with Paint and Memories

This morning, when I draw my curtains ( Ikea, too long and trailing on the carpet, but fine for now) 

this is my view ....the light filtering in through the European ash and oak tree on the bank of the stream.

And this is my view from the other window. I love being able to see the high field and  row of trees on the horizon.

I've been watching this squirrel all week, scurrying about and

burying hazel cob nuts in the lawn,

running round the house, getting ready for winter, giving me a fright when he comes so close to the back door.

It's such a beautiful warm morning I do three loads of washing - the  towels -  and as I've finished painting the walls for now, all my paint splattered clothes and the dust sheets, which are actually  all our old duvet covers and sheets from the different stages and ages and the houses of our life, spattered with paint and memories.

I love having the space to have 3 washing lines - (instead of the cramped closeness of a the lines of a whirly gig spinner) -  put up for me by my gardener. A triangle from flag pole to summer house to apple tree.  I don't know why but it makes me feel like a grown up with a proper washing line.

I have lovely visitors at coffee time. Robin's oldest school friend and his wife. We walk round the garden in the sunshine ....sit at the garden table in the kitchen ( the old dining room table is too big for the space) and nibble on crumbly flapjacks and figs and plums .....and catch up with our lives. And we don't talk much about Robin and the past....  but it's always there between us.....he is always the fourth chair at the table.  He feels so close....I imagine I could reach out and touch him.... all the living warmth of him.....I wish with all my heart that I could.

When they have left to take care of their sick pussy cat, I slather my arms with suncream, squash an old straw hat on my head and finish weeding the front beds. I started it the other evening but ran out of steam. The red Devon clay is dry and compacted but the weeds don't seem to mind and thrive anyway. 

I water the rose bushes and still can't believe my luck to have 

roses...enough of them to cut and bring into the house ...and they still keep flowering.

My supper tonight ....I make a similar version most nights with whatever I have in the fridge from the market or what I have been gifted from home grown gardens......roasted roots, a steamed green, an egg and a splatter of seeds. 

I eat alone but since I've been here I feel Robin around me more strongly somehow ....more than at Sylvan Road....like bringing him with me....in the paint spattered duvet covers.....leaving certain memories behind.... although I can't make new memories with him here....such a strange thought. But I can start choosing what to remember without being triggered by his presence, his illness and the last 8 years embedded in every room of the house, in every plant in the garden.

There is nothing to forget here. Only new memories to make. Which only I will remember.

On This Bench ...something magical happens.

Every now and again I go and sit on the rickety old bench perched on the bank of the stream...

in the shelter of the two silver birch trees one side, and the dense protection of the weeping willow on the other. My favourite tree of all.

When it was hot hot hot at the beginning of August  I carried my salad lunch out there

or sat with a cup of tea.....letting the garden wrap itself around me...instead of my usual habit of  jumping up after 5 minutes to pull up the weeds in the border round the pool, or to pull on my wellies and start clearing the debris from the stream.

 When I sit still out there something magical happens.

Once a robin flitted in and sat on the summer house roof for ages...

and this pussy cat appeared from behind the fir tree and the hazel hedge bordering the field beyond. 

But mostly I just sit and look.... and listen to the trees.... and the air ....and the birds.... not  really mediating but as close to it as I can get..... still thinking but not making plans or imagining how I could chop down bushes or re-build and re-consturct my surroundings.

 And then something imperceptible shifts....not sure what ....but  somehow a still, small space opens up  inside me and I feel utterly protected and supported and safe and loved......just for this moment... on this bench.... in this timeless and beautiful place.... on this day.

And because I remember that magical feeling it keeps calling me out...like it did this morning.

 I woke earlier than usual, pulled on my old paint splattered clothes, took the pussy cat blanket( the one Flapjack used to sleep on in the big chair in the sitting room) and a cup of hot lemon, my pen and notebook and a musty cushion from the summer house and just sat for ages on the bench.... wrapped up against the cool air but letting every sound, every bird song, every beautiful thing enter my being as if for the first time. And let it rest there. Healing me.

This is what I see in front of me...a young apple tree with only a few small apples on it and sadly with some disease in the branches...

the nasturtiums crawling up the steps of the ride-on mower garage.... one of Robin's first ceramics keeping watch by the summer house...

the pool and garage and the end of the house - my bedroom window overlooking it all.

The weeping willow to my left , the ride-on mower garage, which also houses all the pool equipment which I won't need, its ugliness  

screened in parts by huge dahlia bushes which I'm thrilled to have uncovered from choking trails of morning glory, especially 

as we were never very successful at growing dahlias in Sylvan Road.

And behind me the constant sound of trickling water from the stream...I still find it hard to take in that I really really have a brook on my land...that I don't have to get in the car to go in search of water

or beautiful trees to calm my soul. I can walk right out into them whenever I want.

And I won't have to walk to an allotment to grow vegetables...

I can pick warm tomatoes from my own greenhouse next summer...and eat them for lunch sitting on my bench.

I watched this squirrel sitting on the telegraph pole which runs along the road at the front of the house, and listened to the antics of the crows and the gulls for a long time. 

Then I started to get cold and went inside to make a smoothie of goat's milk kefir - which I ordered online from The Chuckling Goat Co -  which I've been drinking for the last week and which has been soothing my inflamed and unsettled gut. I can rely on my body to always reflect my emotional state... not surprisingly, insecure and unsettled and indecisive  is how I have been since I moved.

And then to have a glorious feast of breakfast from the bounty of my sister's garden...

before I take up my paint brush again and return to Duluxing the hall stairs and landing ....and some unlucky spiders... in my whiter and cleaner house.

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.