Beginnings

This is a start of sorts, I am embarking on a house move that is pretty significant, attached as it is to a whole load of life changes. My mother has died, my dear man is about to retire, I return to work soon after a year of staying at home to care for Mum, my daughter is easing away into adult life.

And so we are moving and taking on a new garden......

The move means downsizing, editing away the vast collection of books I have been wandering this world with, asking myself what matters; in particular since I have just lost an irreplaceable person who mattered, without whom I would never have been, without whom I have never been. It is a new experience, and we are starting a new life.

So, what is going?

off to the charity shop

And what is staying? Books and music enough to be getting on with, and still a need for plenty of shelves.

space to move!

It also means leaving the first garden where I've perhaps begun to understand what it's all about. So, the new garden, a blank slate, will be the test of, and exploration of that understanding. 

The space in which I looked after Mum until she died was also a space where I could begin to explore those things that have interested me as long as I can remember, working with needle, with sketchbook, with fabric and thread. There have been some experiments, some openings up in the weave of life for little bits of me. These I may share, not because I think they are of any worth, but because I have found others' accounts of their journeys on the web inspiring. The love of needlework was a gift from my grandmother, the love of art from my great grandmother who painted; a part of both of them still nestled in me. The love of these two women came to me via my mother, who will always be with me and who gave me my love of music. She and my grandmother were the heart of my life after my Dad died, the year I turned 8. We left everything behind and came to Hastings to start afresh in my grandmother's house; she too had been widowed that year.

This blog will, I hope, be a reflection of these varied things that make up a life.

Or perhaps it will fail after a few months.

The journey is what matters.