things with meaning

I come from folk who save things. This could be called hoarding, but perhaps, for us, it is more about keeping connections alive. My grandmother, mother and I all experienced sudden loss of a parent/husband, coupled with the loss of our home environment in which that loved person once existed.

In Ganna's case, she and her two sisters lost their father when they were teenagers. In my case I was seven. Our respective mothers then had to reconstitute their lives without their husbands and with dependent young people. In Ganna's case, she and her sisters came from Ireland to St Leonards on Sea, leaving their old lives behind ands starting again. In my case, Mum and I had to up sticks and move to Hastings from our happy life in Petersfield. She went back to full time work and life went on, because that was what one did in the sixties, no grief counselling or even a sense that it was needed. I cannot imagine how hard that was for her. As life has continued, even those two loved women have become lost to me.

I wonder whether these losses have meant that remnants of that old life take on an almost talismanic power; keepers of the past. As long as these curtains, our dining table, that chair are here, then the past, which includes that lost loved one, isn't entirely gone. The article has known their touch.

There is a laundry basket: wicker, worn, much used. It may well be 90 years old, bought when Ganna was first married in the 1920s. In recent years the wicker ties holding the lid on have  creaked a greeting to me each time I pop another piece of laundry in. I have known it for most of my life. Recently, the final tie holding lid and basket together died. The lid became a separate entity.

I sensibly, if a little wistfully, ordered a replacement. The replacement arrived, but the old basket remained in the way, for weeks. I couldn't face ditching it! Then a thought occurred. I store upright things in my craft room, cardboard rolls, baking parchment, rolls of needlepoint canvas and the like. The basket is the perfect height to hold them.

So now a muddled corner has more clarity, the bigger muddle surrounding it has been rationalised. But most importantly, I sill have that battered, venerable old basket, which existed in different bedrooms through loss and moves, still with the touch of Ganna's and Mum's hands captured in its weave.

I expect I should have just broken it up and burned it, or taken it to the tip.

I'm glad I didn't ...

 

updated yarn

A yarn can be something that you knit or weave or even stitch with, or it can be a tangled tale with twists and turns and little diversions along the way.

The first meaning is obviously what the image below is all about. Yes, a little while ago I treated myself to some lovely Noro yarn, on sale in a very fine wool shop near where I live, which was closing down. Both my loss and my gain. Then a couple of weeks ago I went out with beloved daughter to buy a dress for her for our wedding, and was lured into buying yet more yarn, as one is from time to time. 

I felt it only right that the less recent purchase should be knitted up first, so here is the knitting in progress, along with the pattern.

I have to say, I don't think I'll look anything like as fey and girlish in my version, but (and this is very important to me) the cardigan will be symmetrical across the front, not all skew whiff like the illustration in their pattern book. I have puzzled over this for some time; why oh why are all Noro patterns knitted up all any old how in relation to the (absolutely beautiful) colour changes in the yarns? A brief bit of research online found me this little gem of a phrase from the "blurb" on their website.

"Harmonize natural unevenness, asymmetric pattern and complex color to portray the beauty of the nature. Taking sufficient time to dye and yarn natural flavors and tenderness of materials to preserve their original characters"

Well - apart from the delighfully idiosyncratic translation from the Japanese, I guess the "asymmetric pattern and complex colour" explains the lack of symmetry. But when did you last see an asymmetric butterfly, or flower, or bird's wing pattern, or tabby cat's stripes? 

Nope, just can't be doing with all of that. My cardigan will have, I hope, perfectly matched colour changes across the front and the sleeves, which will give me great satsifaction. Yes that does require hunting through the remaining balls to find the one which starts as near as possible to the end of the previous one, and cutting out the excess but I can use that up in the collar, so no waste there! And what satisfaction when I finally sew it all together and the colour bands flow across my imperfect body in perfect symmetry!!

So, to my second yarn, the tale of the Damn Bloody Mouse - known as DBM hereafter. Yes, there is a link with the following pictures I promise.

We have two lovely cats, Rum and Raisin, who have shared our lives for the past ten or so years. We love them dearly, and feed them far too many biscuits but they are cats, and they do what cats do; catch things. Rum's catches ususally get crunched up on the lawn, though occasionally they are brought in for consumption overnight, with little bits left by the Man's chair in case he's peckish in the morning. Raisin, however, is a bit more squeamish. Once the excitement of the chase and catch is over, he's not quite sure what he should do with this poor wriggling furry thing. So in he comes clattering through the cat flap, a scurry, a yowl or two, and I rush into the kitchen to find a mouse (DBM) cowering under the dresser (where all good mice should hide) and a grumpy fat cat doing his best to get under the dresser. A cat and mouse impasse. I removed the cat, and found things to block up the ends of the dresser so that DBM couldn't escape. However, DBM had escaped already, to hide beneath the bookshelf in the sitting room. Aha, I thought, I can block up the wavy front esdge of the bookshelf with "more things", heavy enough and malleable enough to fit under the wavy bits and leave one small space for DBM to come out. The one small space was, of course, cleverly adapted with a humane mouse trap, baited with rather nice nuts and chocolate biscuits. No problem I thought.

Two days later, having sat each morning listening to little mouse scrabbles, and thinking, "oh, he'll be out soon, tidily captured in the mouse trap" I came down to find that two of the "things" used to block all exits had been wriggeld through and there was no DBM any more. And, to add insult to injury, DBM had been very grateful for the nice feast I'd supplied him, easily accessed by nibbling through the soft corduroy cover that ennables wheat packs to be heated up in microwaves before being applied to sore necks. Perhaps not my best choice for a mouse barrier!

So what does this have to do with the pictures below?

Well, for the next two nights I was awoken several times by little scrabbles and scuttlings in my bedroom. Ye Gods, I thought, DBM has found it's way upstairs and is negotiating the maze of boxes and whotnot under my bed. This is definitely Not Good. The first task, obviously, was to buy more humane mouse traps; the second to move all the boxes out from under the bed, then crawl about, with no thought of dignity, with torch and long poky thing to find the whereabouts of the DBM.

What did I find? A great deal of dust; a pen I'd lost; a single sock; a bookmark; an empy pack of aspirin. I also reacquainted myself with the precious contents of these many and various boxes: old writing cases belonging to Ganna and Mum, stuffed with letters, diaries, account books and the like; a complete handwritten draft of one of Gannas novels, along with the typewritten version that Mum did for her to send to the publishers; a small suitcase with a set of old reel to reel tapes which I know have all of us (me, Mum, Dad, Ganna and Grandad) talking many many years ago in Petersfield when Dad was still alive and playing with his new Grundig tape recorder. And this very fine collection of rug yarns, complete with the canvas (3' x 6') and a handwritten list of the amounts of every yarn there. 

Some were easy - just count the drums and you know how many pieces you've got, but I had a vision of Mum sitting and patiently counting out 929 pieces of green, 482 pale pink, 33 dark blue, 2 khaki ...... as all those below were just small remainders, carefully packed into plastic bags to keep them safe.

They have sat there I'd guess, for the best part of the last 40 odd years, kept for "one day" when she would have time to make the next rug. One day never came - it often doesn't, so here they still are, awaiting a hand and a design to make the best use of them, along with the list of amounts, and calculations of how many pieces would be needed to fill that canvas.

But what of the DBM? Not a sign, not the merest twitch of a whisker, nothing. But still, occasionally, I hear a little scratch and scrabble in the middle of the night. Not in my room, no no, in the walls of my room. I assume the wretched creature has found its way in somehow, and is now searching the fabric of the house for more tasty morsels. All we can hope is that a) it doesn't start trying to eat the wires, b) it finds its way outside somehow, without encountering an enthusaustic feline on its journeys and c) it does so very soon, as I'm rather tired of sleeping with one ear cocked just in case it finds its way onto the bed!!

Garden loveliness and a transformation

Poppy come and gone, poppy come again. I love the contrast between the vivid orange of this California poppy and the gentle fading blue of the Himalayan one - they seem to epitomise their home countries; California, hot and zingy, full of light and energy; the Himalayas cool, ethereal and rather spiritual

the wonderful rhododendron just keeps on flowering, great flouncy heads of sugar pink around which the bees buzz in drunken delight

it chimes well with a pale purple variety nearby - we are so familiar with these lovely plants it's easy to forget their charm. As a child I would pluck the flowerheads from the one in Ganna's garden to suck the sweetness from their base

 down in the dell, Queen Anne's lace is once more filling the space with foamy white nodding heads

irresistible 

While all this loveliness is happening in the garden, up at the house, there has been a total transformation, of a similar enormity to the one that conjured a conservatory from a tatty patio.
This, pictured below just before we moved in, has been acting as a utility room.

It is just off the kitchen, was once the outside with a small coal store at the far end, you can just see the wooden hatch where the coal was delivered, behind the boiler. Previous owners covered it in with the most astonishingly Heath Robinson affair of corrugated plastic, misaligned wooden beams and an asbestos "wall". It rattled and squeaked with the slightest movement of air, the floor was a patchwork of grotty concrete, cracked tiles and tatty lino, the glass in the side door was cracked and there was a rather smelly drain, impervious to bleach and source of nocturnal visits by a tribe of cat food eating slugs, who always melted away by daybreak and who couldn't be discouraged by the most inventive of means.

Now it is a lovely bright space with glass roof and proper vinyl flooring which feels soft and warm underfoot. The end window was moved to the side, there's a cupboard and new clean countertop, plenty of shelf space to put "stuff"

and the corner next to the kitchen door now has windows looking out on the side space, destined to be a courtyard herb garden (one day!) instead of the previous, very unpleasant asbestos construction

We are, as you might guess, delighted with it. It is full of light, warm but not too hot and, joy of joys, quiet!
Thank you Phil!

What Impending Catastrophe? Retrospective

Driving home from work recently I was passed by an ambulance, lights flashing, careful driving, carrying some poor soul to the hospital I guess. I was tired, it had been a long day, but I was quite startled to find tears flooding down my face as I drove on. For many years, this quite commonplace sight, along with the sound of sirens, heard but not seen, brought me a sense of dread. It is the inevitable side effect, I suspect, of being responsible for the care of a fragile soul. Mum started breaking bits if herself when my daughter was about four. She had been extremely fragile in childhood, then began to be once more, post menopause. It started with an elbow, which wasn't too bad but made opening Christmas presents that year rather a task. The breakages increased over the next 20'ish years to include leg, pelvis, sternum, fractured spine, neck, skull, and finally hip, which was the one that she simply couldn't recover from. Each of these breaks involved endless hours in casualty, hospitalisation, and quite a bit of my support once she got home again. During this time I brought my daughter up and looked after my mother in law with Alzheimer's for four years, a dependency that also involved several trips to casualty and, once,  her return by some very understanding policemen, in the middle of the night, in nothing but her nightie. Oh, and a first class honours degree from the OU and the transformation of my life.

My daughter is nearly 25 and living her own life, Mum and my mother in law are gone; the need for me to care has stopped - for now. Yet this flood of tears made me realise that, inside, the constant anxiety, the anticipation of disaster, has become so ingrained that, unwittingly, I am still there in that emotional space, suspended between the last hospital visit and the next, waiting to be needed again. It was a sobering thought and made me wonder how one gets beyond such deeply ingrained responses, grown over a period of many years. Yet isn't that how life is for all of us? We live in a world that requires things from us, and in which things happen to us and, for the most part, we react instinctively. Things good and bad draw responses from us, responses we often don't think about or question. It is as though our souls learn to generalise, cease to be in that childhood state of newness where each thing in a wonder and each event fresh and untried. These instinctive, unregulated reactions to life are often a source of compassionate action, of laughter, of pure delight. They can also be the source of bigotry, hate and misery. If we have a bad day at work, or someone is unpleasant to us, our response to that can lead to more misery. We may snap at a shop assistant because we're feeling grumpy, fail to see a loved one's need because we're still rehearsing the nasty thing that man said this morning.

For me, Mindfulness is a way of trying to mediate these reactions. If we take the time to watch ourselves, not in a self centred me, me, me way, but in a spirit of investigation and of letting go, hopefully we find ourselves questioning that stab of irritation, realising that perhaps the person who has just been unkind may be having a really bad day themselves. They are simply people, not the enemy, and letting go of the negative response allows us to move forward in clarity, dropping the inevitable reaction at "them" and leaving it where it belongs, in the past. Now is always now, the past will always have happened, but we can encourage ourselves to leave the bad things there. How this helps with my impending sense of catastrophe, I'm not entirely sure. It is so ingrained I am mostly unaware of it, other than as a constant disquiet whispering in the back of my mind. However, I shall try. I know when I am old, it will be my dearest wish that my daughter is not burdened with my care. I also recognise what a deep and welcome gift caring for Mum proved to be. She would not want me to still be anxious, just as I would not want Jen to feel this way. With awareness may come release.

more grandmothers gifts

I am gradually sifting and sorting "things", and thought I'd share a few more precious bits that have come to me, handed down through the generations. Some I found in the past, some have come more recently on Mum's death. They are little fragments of lace and embroidery about which I know nothing. I have treasured many of them for years, tucking them away in a drawer, wrapped in acid free paper to try and ensure they don't deteriorate, though I have to confess that the little embroidered bag was once home to my marbles! I have no idea of their age, but suspect they are mostly Victorian. I do know that my great grandmother's family moved from Ireland to Liverpool in about 1869. My great great grandfather had been a Methodist Minister, travelling all around southern Ireland preaching. He lost his faith after the deaths of six children from illness in a very short space of time. Once in Liverpool the family seem to have set up as drapers, and are recorded as such in the census. My Aunt recalls her Aunt Annie doing the "most beautiful delicate smocking" on dresses, and teaching her the skill; my grandmother embroidered, knitted and worked crochet lace; Mum knitted and sewed and my Aunt is a very skilled needlewoman. I like to think that some of these things were worked by family hands, I am happy to feel that I carry on that tradition in some small way. 


Here are just a few of the treasures.

Today I found my childhood in a suitcase

It was all here

These beautiful suitcases contain a myriad of family memories. I feel privileged to own them, and pay tribute to my dear little Mum, who treasured them herself all these years.







I have always had them in the back of my awareness, part of my childhood's fabric. I peered into them when I was much younger, but in recent years, as she declined, it seemed an intrusion on her privacy, so fragile she was, yet enduring.


I wept with relief to find them intact, such poignant things

There are sad things, to do with my father's death, but also happy things like this!

The Beatles circa 1964 - by me - aged 3!

And wonderful things like Mum's diaries kept during the war 1940-1947.

I am almost afraid to read them - she is still so close.

New home for old pieces

This little tableau of furniture has found it’s place in my study on the south side of our house where sun can warm and illuminate. None of it is is new, each piece is redolent of the women of my family.


In the very foreground is the leg of my grandmother’s chair, always known as The Bergére Chair. I believe my grandfather Gerald bought it for her, though it may have been in the family longer. She was a contemplative woman, a Christian Scientist of very deep and sincere faith, who spent many hours sitting in this chair in her bedroom, thinking. It was here that we found her after she had the stroke that killed her. I find no morbidity in that thought, rather I wonder if some frail remnant of her molecules lingers in the grain of the wood, touching mine as my hands smooth it when I too sit there. It once had a very worn donkey brown brocade velvet seat cushion, Mum had a new cover made for it as a birthday present for me one year, the seat cushion fits precisely round the arms of the chair so was a complex piece of upholstery.


Next in the image is a little black wood, fold out table. This was also hers, the repository of her pen, often lost or rather, “taken by the fairies”; whatever book she was currently reading; her glasses and her table lamp. This little table sat in our sitting room, by the chimney breast where she could warm her twiglety legs at the stove, a great shiny glass doored anthracite burner, with dark iridescent metal finish. This had a convoluted looking gas lighter with a flex that attached it to the gas tap by the hearth. It looked rather like a short sword with holes down the side and had to be lit, at which point it roared into life with blue flame glowing down it’s length. This was then thrust into the coals and not removed until they were glowing red and orange. Behind this great metal heart was the boiler, which provided us with our hot water downstairs.


Beside this table is a little wooden chair. This has a cane seat, but is quite plain otherwise. It came from my mother’s flat, but probably belonged originally to my great grandmother, Nanya.


Behind that is a little kneehole desk, very simple, with one lockable drawer and three more below it. This was my mother’s home typing desk, bought with the wages of her first secretarial job, just after the war in London. She saved up shillings here and there from a very small wage until she had enough, then bought it from a shop in Cheam where she and her parents lived. The handle and keyhole in the top drawer are worn by her hands. She typed a myriad of cheerful letters to friends here: one of the enduring themes from letters of condolence this year was people’s delight in receiving her chatty, funny, thoughtful hand typed letters, an art that is perhaps dying, or at least being replaced by differing forms of communication.


None of these pieces of furniture would feature in Cash in the Attic, or a Kevin McCloud Grand Design, though perhaps Kirstie Allsopp might flutter over them if she found them in a furniture warehouse. None have been bought to "go" with our new home because we fancy a restyle. They are quiet, personal, cherished bits of domestic history and beyond price to me, imbued as they are with lives that I knew and loved dearly.

The new garden

Just a small taster. This is the top third, seen from my bedroom window. Below this are an area to turn into the kitchen garden and a further space below that for fruit trees and wildlife. That is where the badgers lurk! The land falls away so there is a good view of greenery outside, very peaceful to wake up to in the morning.

The bedroom, however, was PINK. Time for a change

When the weather is dryer I will take more photos. Just now we are busy getting ready for a move in four days time! This has included repainting two rooms and getting a cooker installed as the previous residents removed theirs and scrapped it!! How helpful.

How Many???

House moving is always an opportunity to reassess the physical baggage we accumulate through being stationary. I have been in my current, much loved space for 8 years almost to the month.

It has been a place of caring for my mother, a sanctuary, a miracle of synchronicity in the way we acquired it, flat by flat, when needed.

However, it has also been a space into which more has been put, than has been removed!

I am sorting my clothes drawers, T-Shirt drawers first, smart and gardening. I have HOW many?

I rather think fifty four is more than enough for any gal!!!! Time for some serious downsizing, simplification, relinquishing. A good thing to be doing after a retreat.

I have a friend, Pen, who lives deep in the sacredness of simplicity. She writes beautifully and lives a life of profoundly though out, but very gentle principle. She is a sweet and as characterful as her pictures suggest.

Reggie!!!

Reggie (our neighbour's cat!), awaiting cat-aloguing

Thought you should see the back

This always looks so tentative, as though the stitches were slipping away by themselves.
The piece is a mish mash of textiles - a corner of my old gardening jacket - I couldn't bear to throw away the soft worn corduroy; a piece of my daughters old jeans, cut up to patch newer ones that fit and the offcuts from a skirt of my Mums - the dark green bit on the front that defines the hedgerow. She wore it when pregnant with me, I found the trimmings when sorting through her stuff after her death - a sad and ongoing process, like domestic archaeology.

light at equinox

it's interesting, to me anyway, how one gets used to the flow of light around a home. I know that every equinox, the sunlight will flood great rafts of light down my hallway straight through to the kitchen




That the living room will be golden first thing in the morning



I wonder what light the new house will hold

A lovely laundry day

Wonderful autumn afternoon with washing flying in the breeze

Holding sunlight in it's bowl

 

aslant

 

an angel!

A little plane drifts into the clouds

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.