City

The cold is vengeful. It’s bitter. It carries a mace, and its teeth are long and sharp and pointy. Its breath is a painful gale, the winds of which find their way up sleeves, through cuffs, goosebumps all along arms and legs. They make necks shiver. Hair stand on end, eyes water, noses drip… fingers turn to steel.

There is blossom on trees but frost pushes its way out of the earth in place of pale seedlings. Daffodils nodding in the sun but every breath you exhale is a puff of frothing cloud.

When she finally saw him walking along the road, striding confidently through the crowd, she noticed the smile on his face. Satisfied, self assured, sun in his eyes, walking on a cloud.

She drew back immediately.

She didn’t know what she was expecting. A sombre face? In one of the biggest cities on earth? Sunshine, after months of grey – was she expecting to see him depressed?

My spirits are low, Laura. He had written. Low, down to the ground. The men tread on them with their freshly shined boots, the women trip over them in their finery, the children yank at them, but they do not rise.

And she was here, his saviour, she had thought, but no. He was jauntily walking through this town. His town. What could she possibly bring from the muddy, countryside that could outshine the triumph of this place?

She slid backwards, further into the shadows, while he walked through the sunshine. The cold brick wall behind her seemed to seep into her coat, her back prickled and an icy pain took hold of her.

I have had a blow, Laura. I often stop myself from reaching out to you when I feel this way. To hear your words of wisdom – always wisdom, solace, calmness, joy, even. Joyful naivety, I call it. But one needs that in a pressing world where one’s thoughts threaten to drown a fellow.

So she came. She packed her carpetbag, she caught the train, in her drab red coat and her best hat – which, here, among the fine women of the big city, looked akin to something the dog had been chewing on.

She is nothing special. Nothing real. Nothing.

She turned, and fled.

Image Credit

Nineties

I love nineties movies.

That’s such a globalised thing to say.

The way old me – the me not tainted by the internet and TUMBLR – would put it is ‘I love films made in the nineties’.

I do.

They make me nostalgic.

Which is funny because my life in the early nineties didn’t exist. I was just an egg.

Then in the mid-nineties I was born.

I was really a child and adolescent of the naughties.

But I do rather much prefer the nineties.

It was like the teetering cusp.

Of what?

Old and new, I suppose.

Archaic traditions marrying new age technological revolution but we were still mostly analogue so there was a lot of purity left in the world.

Now I peer out at my world through pixellated curtains and it’s a burning shambles is what it is.

But I don’t want to talk about all that. While I can, I sometimes like to hunker down under three blankets (it’s cold in my part of the world. Spring blossom appears on trees but it’s below freezing and there is frost on the grass in the mornings) and watch films made in the early 1990s.

The hair.

The clothes.

The speech.

The lack of identity politics. The lack of fury for the sake of fury.

Just people livin’ their lives – ‘unproblematically’.

Call me ‘old fashioned’. Because yes I know each time period comes with its own set of problems. But – the heart yearns for what it yearns for.

I would like to hunker down with a mug of earl grey tea with some milk and no sugar and watch films made in the nineties.

And read books written by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

And lose myself in lost lands.

On Things

Hello! (Said in a voice like Izzy. Loud, there is an upwards inflection on the ‘o’ at the end, it’s cheerful, but there is a hint of trying something – too hard?)

It’s March! (Said in a voice like ME. A GIRL. No. Not a girl. A WOMAN. The child me cringes at that word, I used to think a ‘woman’ was an awful thing. I always wanted to be a ‘lady’. The woman me cringes at ‘lady’. Seems to me that to be a ‘lady’ is a patriarchal invention. To keep the WOMEN looking pretty for the male gaze. Staying prim in their kitchens and nurseries and painting pictures and filling their heads with frills. A WOMAN hoes onions. Hoovers stairs. Lifts two children with her solid, muscular arms. Works hard. Loves fiercely. Fills her mind with knowledge. Whatever it may be. She writes and reads and [read the following as verbs] mothers and daughters and sisters and wifes [no not wives – she VERB wife’s] and she is an entity in and of herself and…. I DIGRESS!).

it’s march.

the month I adore.

mainly because I was born in march.

i was loved when I was born. i was loved till I was 8 or 9, and then I was just… there.

Anyway. I adore March.

March in the UK this year is blustery, I am afraid. Cold. But we have glorious blossoms on glorious trees and my neighbours recently trimmed their apple tree and a couple of the branches fell over into our side of the garden, and I could see the buds forming on the branches so I seized them, precious things that they are, and put them in old glass jars filled with water and in my kitchen, right now, a miracle is happening. Buds are opening their delicious petals to the warmth of my oven and hob and the hum of my woman self humming as I prepare meals for my family. There is a spring in my kitchen. And it makes me so glad.

But folks, I am tired. I am on my feet from 5 am most days till about 1 am. And then I sleep a deep sleep only to be seized out of it and shaken viciously awake by a new day and my responsibilities.

I have no time to write or read. Just work. And kids.

And I am also prioritising time with my kids. To play with them and teach them. Things like fungus growing on old tree trunks and how not to slap each other when one doesn’t get their way. Things like washing one’s hands after one eats and how to not squash a ladybird to death everytime we examine one. Things like a cup full of fat juicy wriggly worms. Things like not eating soil. Things like ‘mowing the lawn’ with a pair of scissors. Things like not pulling Grandma’s cat’s tail. Things like days of the week and months of the year and years of the decade and century and what people did. Things like not wiping your hands on the chair in the same breath you use to tell me about the solar system.

Wondrous wondrous eyes.

Wondrous children.

Bittersweet, sad, joyful and frustrating.

If you are a parent, and if your child has long flown the nest, how do you manage the heartbreak? Or are you sensible about your emotions?