What I wanted

Yesterday morning was odd. Or rather... I was odd.

Dave had set off early in the car on an errand while I was still asleep: usually I like that kind of morning. I like to wake up to a quiet house with no need to speak. I feel free and my world seems spacious. And I usually like Saturdays because I feel as though I can do what I like and not answer to the Puritan who sits on my shoulder throughout the week, asking me if I am using my time profitably.

But yesterday Saturday felt wrong. Something felt missing, and I thought it might be family. Any family - Zoe and co, Isaac and co, the family member who declines to be named and the lovely Jaine. 

I read the news online and felt worse (surprise, surprise.)

I had breakfast in bed and stayed there reading a book. That was no help: it was about the first world war. 

I thought: This isn't what Saturday mornings are like. Saturday mornings in Boulder consist of the girls getting into bed with me, showing me funny cat videos, inviting me into their Minecraft worlds, and Isaac cooking breakfast while Wendy has a lie in. He cooks bacon on Saturdays when I'm there as a treat for me. Then we take the girls to their gym class and we watch them through the viewing window while doing the New York Times crossword together. That is my Saturday morning in Boulder, and that's what I wanted.

Cece and me playing Guess Who

In the early afternoon when I knew Isaac would be waking up, I texted him and said I missed them all and I missed their Saturday morning.

He texted back: it is a strange one this morning. both kids are at sleepovers elsewhere. first time ever.

So it turns out that what I was yearning for wasn't happening anyway. 

I tried to paint outside but the light was too bright and I wasn't in the mood. Eventually I gave myself a talking to, and did some gardening (the first time this year.) I sowed my cosmos and some more sweet peas. Dave had got back and we dug up an annoying and ungainly buddleia and planted something else to replace it. 

When we first moved here the garden was a solace and I sometimes spent all day working in it. It was good to be making a difference to something when I couldn't make a difference to other things in my life, and I couldn't change the awfulness out there in the world. Yesterday that awfulness got me down, but later, walking above the village before tea, I sat down in a field and looked at the view and counted my blessings. 

I'm feeling so bad about the news out there that I'm going to take a week off from it. I shall focus on enjoying tiny moments of happiness and being thankful.   

That book I bought in Boulder called Good Poems for Hard Times is excellent. On the back cover it says the book is “a buoy for people in ordinary trouble.” I think that's me.

Here is a poem I read in it yesterday that I enjoyed:

The Future

On the afternoon talk shows of America
the guests have suffered life's sorrows
long enough. All they require now
is the opportunity for closure,
to put the whole thing behind them
and get on with their lives. That their lives,
in fact, are getting on with them even
as they announce their requirement
is written on the faces of the younger ones
wrinkling their brows, and the skin
of their elders collecting just under their
set chins. It's not easy to escape the past,
but who wouldn't want to live in a future
where the worst has already happened
and Americans can finally relax after daring
to demand a different way? For the rest of us,
the future, barring variations, turns out
to be not so different from the present
where we have always lived—the same
struggle of wishes and losses, and hope,
that old lieutenant, picking us up
every so often to dust us off and adjust
our helmets. Adjustment, for that matter,
may be the one lesson hope has to give,
serving us best when we begin to find
what we didn't know we wanted in what
the future brings. Nobody would have asked
for the ice storm that takes down trees
and knocks the power out, leaving nothing
but two buckets of snow melting
on the wood stove and candlelight so weak,
the old man sitting at the kitchen table
can hardly see to play cards. Yet how else
but by the old woman's laughter
when he mistakes a jack for a queen
would he look at her face in the half-light as if
for the first time while the kitchen around them
and the very cards he holds in his hands
disappear? In the deep moment of his looking
and her looking back, there is no future,
only right now, all, anyway, each one of us
has ever had, and all the two of them,
sitting together in the dark among the cracked
notes of the snow thawing beside them
on the stove, right now will ever need.

Wesley McNair

"The Future" by Wesley McNair, from Talking in the Dark. © David R. Godine, 1998.

Shame

Why, when the world is such a beautiful place...

 

do some people behave in such an ugly fashion? 

And here, the actions of the current UK government have been shameful in so many ways, with this the latest nastiness:

 

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

 

Maggie Smith

 "Good Bones" from Waxwing.  Copyright © 2016 by Maggie Smith.  

 

Yesterday I wrote to my MP to tell her that in times of war it is vital to have a leader who is honourable, truthful and trustworthy, and that Johnson is patently not that person.

Today I am writing to protest against his cruel new policy to dump people fleeing from war and persecution in a country well known for its repressive regime. They come here to seek asylum and we should deal with their asylum claims here. 

I am trying to remain hopeful that eventually compassion, justice and honesty will prevail in public discourse.  

And to remember that it is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.

I've been on my bike on the Trail, I've been to a local art exhibition, and now I'm going to garden and paint. 

I hope you have a lovely Easter weekend.

There’s no place like home

 Dave has always called Hepworth Towers “the ugliest house in the village,” and perhaps it was when we bought it. Now it’s not. But in any case, I don’t care what the house looks like from the outside because if I’m inside or outside I’m looking at our fabulous views of the countryside, not the house. Just look at the header. And these:

It’s always hard to say goodbye to our Colorado family, but Hepworth Towers is a fabulous place to come home to. And coming home this time, at the beginning of spring, has verged on a spiritual experience. This is me, lapping up the greenness after the dried grass in Colorado:

But there have been changes.

First up, the tower of yoghurt cartons in the kitchen window: they have to go.

Then there is the toothpaste tube hanging on the bathroom window reveal.

I’ve always chided Dave about his messy habits with toothpaste and this is his new solution. He says he is using far less toothpaste as a result, and if he’d made this adjustment 50 years ago he’d have saved enough money to buy another guitar. Yes Dave.

The other difference is the temperature of the house. It’s bracing. The lane we live on has no gas supply and we depend on oil-fired central heating, plus a log burning stove. The price of our last batch of oil was 61 pence per litre but two weeks ago the price was 128 ppl. So we didn’t stock up and the heating is off. So although we don’t have ice on the inside of our windows, like we did when I was little, its …well…bracing, as I said. But I am getting used to it. I lived without central heating for the first 30 years of my life and I can do it again. We do have plenty of logs thanks to Dave’s hard work scouring the countryside last winter, and we’re fine. 

And the last change? I brought it home with me. These Lego figures were a present from Isaac when we visited the Lego store in Golden with the family:

Dave and me

Home

My extra long journey home was not so bad, despite the fact that the baggage handlers at Heathrow broke my faithful 15 year old suitcase, despite the fact that Trainline double booked my seat….my first ever first class seat that I’d booked to avoid the 1 in 13 people in the U.K. who have Covid.

 

As I was sitting waiting for my train, eating my croque monsieur at the St Pancras Pain Quotidien, I texted my friend Het a photo and said “Guess where I am” and she did and asked what time my train was, and then the conversation went dead. I finished my lunch and walked up to the seat by the ticket barrier and 5 minutes later somebody walked up and poked me on the knee. It was Het! She’d left her flat and hopped on the tube and come to spend twenty minutes with me.

We’ve known each other for over 50 years, and usually get together 2 or 3 times a year but since the pandemic arrived two years ago we’ve had to make do with FaceTime, and it was such a treat to see her and have a hug. It brightened my long journey home.

Today I feel gruesome with jetlag and I’m lying on the sofa reading poems.

This is the one I’d like to share with you today:

Sunshine

 Isaac is in the basement having a workout. Wendy and Cece are at a clothes swap.  Lux has cycled to meet friends to decorate the yard of another friend with welcome back signs, as this friend has just returned from three months travel with her family.

I am sitting in the sunshine resolving not to take the same route to Boulder as I’ve taken the last 12 trips. BA have cancelled my connecting flight again! For some reason they don’t consider the afternoon flight from Heathrow to Manchester worth saving. Pah!  I’ll fly with someone else next time on a different route. They’ve lost me, the rats.

I now have my first ever E rail ticket in my thus far empty Apple wallet, plus my first ever digital Railcard. As I waded through all the forms and passwords and checkboxes online, I said to Isaac (sitting next to me, providing back up confidence) “This is good for my brain cells, isn’t it?

It’s fabulously sunny here this Saturday lunchtime, and there are three hyacinths flowering in Wendy‘s garden. But the grass is not yet green and although there are buds on the trees, I’ve seen no leaves. It’ll be a wrench to leave the family tomorrow, but I’ll be pleased to see Dave, my daffodils, green fields and lambs, blackthorn blossom and hawthorn leaves.

Yesterday Wendy and I cycled into town to an art exhibition. It was thought-provoking, and I saw something I want to try when I get home.

Afterwards we went to the Tea House where Wendy treated me to sparkling wine PLUS a hibiscus refresher – another new thing for me and my brain cells – but also for my enjoyment.

Changed plans

I should have been flying home today but British Airways cancelled one of my flights and the alternative journey they proposed was interminable and insupportable. So thanks to the hospitality/love of Wendy and Isaac I’m staying another three days, and will have - I hope - a tolerable journey home.

Also, I was supposed to be going on Cece’s class trip to the Boulder Museum this morning early, but I woke up dizzy and I cried off. I think my problem is merely blocked sinuses but I decided that a dizzy 72-year-old and a class of excited nine-year-olds were not a good combination.

So instead I’ve been sitting in the sunshine on the front porch reading A Town Called Solace.

I have loved it. I recommend it heartily. Years ago I read and enjoyed Mary Lawson’s earlier books Crow Lake,  and The Other Side of the Bridge. But I think I like this one best.

One of the characters is an old woman who is dying in hospital. I’d pegged her age at mid 80s but it turns out she is 72, the same age as me. It made me ponder. Do I sound like her? Does she sound older because she is ill? Has the author got her voice wrong? Am I a bad judge? Who knows? It doesn’t matter: the book is terrific. 

Today’s photos are of Frisco, a small town where we called in for lunch on the way down from the mountains at the weekend.

Photo by Isaac

Photo by Isaac

Today’s poem from ‘Good Poems for Hard Times’ made me smile:

Meandering

A blog post is long past due and I’m sorry. I don’t know why I haven’t been posting while I have been away this time. I am living off the fat of the land and doing new things but somehow to show you photos and talk about it has felt as if it would be a lame recounting of holiday stories. And I don’t want the blog to be lame. Nor do I want to blog about politics when you will all be able to guess what I think about what’s going on in the U.K. at present.

So…how to blog?

The girls are as fabulous as ever.

Wendy and Isaac are as welcoming: they spoil me rotten.

I’ve done a lot of sitting in the sunshine and thinking. 

Sign outside a Boulder gallery

I’ve bought a pile of books from the Boulder Bookstore.

I’ve had every kind of weather - from snow and ice to rain and cold to wild winds to sunbathing weather. The Boulder climate is WEIRD. 

I’ve had some new kinds of food:

We’ve been to a wildlife sanctuary out on the Colorado plains where rescued tigers, lions, bears, and a host of other animals are rehabilitated and then given acres of pasture to roam. Visitors walk along elevated metal walkways so as not to stress out the animals.

This is Cece, looking down on a white tiger in a smallish cage getting used to the new environment - including the other animals - before being let out into a ‘field.’

This last weekend we had a wonderful stay in Buena Vista, a small town high up in the Rockies (almost 8,000 feet.) It’s set in a ‘dish’ surrounded by mountains. Here’s the view from our Airbnb:

And it’s within half an hour’s drive of hot springs. Here’s Wendy and Lux, feeling the benefit.

Today I came across a strange book by Amanda Lovelace in the bookshop poetry section called ‘unlock your storybook heart’ which I know sounds twee, but it isn’t. 

Someone recently said to me that as soon as you get home from a holiday, and get back into your normal everyday existence, the holiday vanishes. I knew what they meant but I don’t think it’s quite the same when you’re retired. And I hope it won’t be true of me when I get home. This is a page that I liked in the strange book, which relates to my holiday:

The skies are bluer here

The sky really is bluer here than at home, and I’m not talking metaphorically. We’re a mile high, and the air is thinner.

Yesterday we flew kites in the park.

And last evening Wendy and Isaac treated me to my happy drink in my happy place - margaritas at the bar in Bar Taco. 

I’m aware of the war, and the bad U.K. news with the heartless spring budget and the P&O outrage, but I have to admit that although it’s completely irrational, it feels easier to read about it hours later than I would at home. It makes no sense at all, but I feel as if I’m in another world here with the family. 

Yesterday, though, I found myself buying this book:

And this is what it just opened at:

Early morning walk in the park with Isaac

 

Meet and greet yesterday at Denver airport

 

Flying away

I must just tell you that if you need a Fit to Fly test, then Wren Healthcare do it online, and it is easy and quick. Logged on at 9 a.m, and test certificate in my email by 9.25. How about that?

I am flying away early tomorrow, God willing, to see my lovely family in Boulder.

Whooppee!

Yesterday afternoon I had an email conversation with a Ukrainian friend in Kyiv, and last night, unsurprisingly, I had bad dreams. This morning I read that an apartment block in Nataliya's part of Kyiv had been shelled. 

'Are you OK?' I emailed. 

Yes, she is OK, if by OK you mean alive.

How can it be that I am here in this safe and quiet house and she is there in that hell?

Every morning, a woman in Lviv called Antipina Yaroslava greets her thousands of followers on Twitter, saying she is drinking her war coffee, 

and people all over the world respond with photos of where they are and what they are drinking - coffee, tea - sending her good wishes, love, hope, courage, prayers. She likes the connection. It's a form of solidarity. So far this morning 339 people have sent her messages. 

My Californian aging hippie friend and I had a Facetime chat the other day, and I asked her if she had seen the moving footage of German people at the Berlin railway station, greeting Ukrainian refugees with offers of accommodation. No, she hadn't, but she had seen a line of empty baby buggies left on a platform so mothers with babies could step off the train and use them straight away. Who thought of that? How kind, how empathetic.

I was upset and disturbed when I set off for my morning ride on the Trail. Now I feel better. I'm so fortunate to live here in this safe and quiet place, with daffodils about to come out in the garden, and cows in the field along the lane.

This morning on the Trail

This is the poem I read after the news and before I got out of bed this morning:

Sweetness

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear   

   one more friend   

waking with a tumor, one more maniac   

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness   

   has come   

and changed nothing in the world   

except the way I stumbled through it,   

   for a while lost   

in the ignorance of loving   

someone or something, the world shrunk   

   to mouth-size,   

hand-size, and never seeming small.   

I acknowledge there is no sweetness   

   that doesn’t leave a stain,   

no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ....   

Tonight a friend called to say his lover   

   was killed in a car   

he was driving. His voice was low   

and guttural, he repeated what he needed   

   to repeat, and I repeated   

the one or two words we have for such grief   

until we were speaking only in tones.   

   Often a sweetness comes   

as if on loan, stays just long enough   

to make sense of what it means to be alive,   

   then returns to its dark   

source. As for me, I don’t care   

where it’s been, or what bitter road   

   it’s traveled   

to come so far, to taste so good.

Stephen Dunn, “Sweetness” from New and Selected Poems 1974-1994. Copyright © 1989 by Stephen Dunn. 

 

Sunday

 

Loveliness

A family member rang me up in tears this week because of the war in Ukraine. 

Friends and family have told me they can’t bear to watch the news. One person has even stopped reading it: she is reading ‘around’ it - about the history of Ukraine and Russia and NATO and how we got here.

All of these people care deeply about what is going on and have done their best to give succour to refugees - through donating goods, giving money, signing petitions about refugees and writing to their MPs. It’s like a letter writing factory at our house: Dave and I are both at it. The response from my Tory MP so incensed me I wrote back immediately pointing out the untruths and the ridiculousness of her arguments.

But I don’t think it is helpful to allow ourselves to be in constant torment about the suffering. We have to do what we can and as much as we can, and stay informed, and then live our normal daily lives. It’s OK to have fun and enjoy ourselves.

This is a tweet this weekend from someone in Lviv:

So I went to a wonderful exhibition at the Buxton museum called ‘Treasuring Trees - Celebrating Derbyshire Trees.’ It is largely the work of three people: watercolourist Sarah Parkin, visual artist Valerie Dalling, and environmental storyteller and artist Gordon McClellan. 

I don't know Sarah and Gordon, but Valerie lives in the next village to me and it was she who took the photograph for the front cover of EVEN WHEN THEY KNOW YOU.    

These are the two photos by Valerie from the exhibition that I liked the best. They’re both taken on the eastern moors of the Peak District.

Sunset

Birches at play

The exhibition is on until June, so if you can - go! If you do, check out the super photo exhibition on the ground floor, which has been put on by a group of local photographers. 

Another small pleasure this week was meeting Chrissie Poulson at Hassop Station for lunch outside. Chrissie has written many crime novels (e.g. her latest is An Air That Kills ) but she is also a prolific short story writer, and we had huge fun discussing an idea she has for a new really gruesome story. Her mind is way darker than mine. 

Wordle is a daily small pleasure and I like it best when I get the answer in 4, because it means I’ve had to work for it, but it still feels like a success. I am one of those people who shies away from fads, but I investigated Wordle and I’m so glad I did.

Last thing at night I watch something comforting, and recently I’ve moved back to Virgin River, but I am still baffled as to why anyone should want to be friends with Hope, the most annoying and selfish character - who is nevertheless loved by lovely people - that I have ever met on screen.

Back to refugees and Ukraine...

The following event is taking place next week but I hope to be in Colorado so unfortunately I won't be able to go. Please, of you're local, it would terrific if you could support it.