These old roads lead to places that have changed as the seasons roll over the land.
Cold and frost coat everything in an ethereal beauty, which vanishes overnight once the thaw sets in, leaving behind rotten mulch and the filth of the world exposed.
But then spring follows soon after, hustling and blowing gales behind which she sprinkles the faintest dusting of light green. Buds, too small to be seen, begin to bloom on bare branches. And then there is an explosion. Seemingly overnight trees erupt with their pink and white tresses. Grass seems longer, greener, brighter. Skies appear bluer.
Yet these old roads remember those who have trekked over them, through the seasons, through the landscape change, as cities rose and fell around them. Bright futures crumbling to dust, and settlers changing the way things were, making things that are, that would be, that were to come.
Gale force winds tore at bare branches. Dead and withered leaves flew past, circled the ground, were wrenched here and there until they crumbled under the pressure of the storm or blew themselves into a rut from which they could not escape. Heavy clouds scudded speedily across the sky, grey and gloomy, bright here and dark there. Wild geese soared against the tempest in their hundreds under the clouds. It was a mighty sight for the sorest eyes.
It was under such blustery circumstances that she found herself being introduced to Thomas Norton, the doctor from South Bridge, a very distinguished young man.
‘Oh,’ he began eagerly, but she interrupted him, putting her hand out to him, saying curtly, ‘Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Dr Norton’.
His lips parted, such a slight movement, his voice cracked, eyebrows lifted.
‘But, L-‘ he began, and again she interrupted, ‘I did not know you were from South Bridge. My family lives there also. I have just taken the train from there this very morning. How long has it been since you left the dear place?’
Tom glanced quickly at their mutual acquaintance. Clearing his throat, he took her hand and smiled warmly. She saw him swallow, felt how hard his hand squeezed hers, and oh, the way his chin moved – all these mannerisms she recognised so very well from their childhood, adolescence, early adulthood together, all these mannerisms she knew with such familiarity, and which tore at her heartstrings. Still, she held firm under his discomfort.
‘Two years,’ came his reply. His voice cracked a little
‘Oh, that’s a while, Doctor.’
‘Indeed it is,’ he murmured.
‘Have you any plans to return?’ she inquired, knowing full well his answer.
‘Not at present,’ and his eyes smarted at her, ‘I have – I have other plans here at present.’
‘Yes!’ gasped Lady Locke, clapping her hands, ‘Why yes! Doctor Norton is to be married soon, Laura, to the wonderful Miss Rosalind Winters. You made her acquaintance yesterday, she came for tea with her cousins.’
‘Oh how lovely,’ said Laura, simply. She smiled, her fullest, brightest smile at him. Her eyes danced, her dimples flitted in and out of her cheeks, ‘congratulations, Doctor Norton, I wish you’ she paused, her eyes meeting his, wordless exchange running between them like a current of fire, ‘all the happiness in the world.’ The last came out as a breathless whisper.
‘Thank you, very much, Miss Smith,’ was his reply.
When the two ladies carried on their way, skirts tugged this way and that by the wind, shawls flapping behind them, he stood for a few moments as the world darkened around him. He looked at the sky. The birds soaring above, the wind was almost visible. It whipped around him, almost carrying him off with the strength of it.
She didn’t know where it came from, only that it must have dropped down from the sky, because that is where clouds tend to consort. They harmonise together up there, she noted, once the cloud had settled in her room.
It liked the eastern corner, where the walls would be soaked in the liquid gold of the evening sun.
It hung there, and when she was in her room she felt as though it were watching her.
Why won’t you go back up and keep your friends company? she asked, curiously, after it had been hovering in her eastern corner for three days. It didn’t have a face, but it seemed to look at her forlornly. Then it turned its shapeless body and looked the other way. Marigold decided not to question it further. It really did seem rather unsociable. Perhaps it needed some time to itself, to gather its thoughts. Perhaps it had had an argument with its friends up there in the sky, although when she herself looked up at the crisp blue sky, they all seemed to have dissipated.
Do you feel forgotten? she asked one day. The cloud seemed even more forlorn at that. Well, perhaps you can accompany me about my day then.
And it did. Everywhere she went, it hung, a lower than average cloud, above her head. People started to notice it. There goes Marigold and her lower than average cloud.
Over time, it grew greyer and greyer. More and more forlorn. One afternoon, when the sun had shone for most of the day, and Marigold had gone about her lessons, come home through the front door (the cloud always sailed back into her room through the window she constantly left ajar for it), she noticed the cloud looking particularly black.
Perhaps, she said, stacking her books on her desk and switching on the lamp, so that the room was immediately bathed in its soft, warm glow, you just need a good old cry.
Perhaps it did. For it began to weep. A sad, lonely, loud wail. So loud in fact, that Marigold’s mother rushed into the room in a panic, to find her daughter staring shocked at the eastern corner of the room, which was filled with twilight from the gaping window, and no cloud in sight, just a majestic puddle on the floor.
Remember that guy who said he would walk five hundred miles, and then five hundred more, just to be the guy who walked a thousand miles to fall at her door? Talk about unrealistic love.
Which young person dreamed up a grand romance only to crash down onto the ebony rocks of a fearsome shore when they were confronted with the harsh realisation that it wasn’t true, that it never would be?
He rolled his eyes at this. Here she goes again. Soon she would lament that he had not given her a handwritten card for their anniversary. He braced himself, and there it came. There it was. A small sharp sentence covered in thorns, aimed expertly at him, and thrown with exceptional accuracy. Why, she was a master at this trick. It hit its target alright, and it was laced with poison, for he immediately tasted something sour in his mouth, and a little ghoul settled itself around his heart and squeezed it maliciously.
He threw his fair share of thorns, too, he supposed. He laced them with poison also. Sometimes the green poison of jealousy. Sometimes the fiery poison of fury. Sometimes it was just plain old hurt.
The hurt we give. Without thinking, mostly. Not realising it escalates into something larger. Like a giant saucer hanging ominously over the earth, it feels too late to take the thorns back because they build up into something elephantine. A literal elephant in the room.
And you pick at it and pick at it each day and it’s like a fungi, exploding into something else.
One day he wasn’t tired though. He stood by the window one morning. It was exceptionally cloudy, but exceptionally beautiful, because the sunlight fought majestically that day for its glorious life, and lit up the world in a hazy, wintry light, shining through the thin shroud of cloud, and giving life to the dead wintry earth below.
And he realised something, when he saw her step out into the back garden with her basket of freshly washed clothes piled high, to hang in the frigid air and become cold and crisp. Her clothes and his. She began pegging the laundry onto the washing line. Her blouse, his trousers, his shirt, a pair of thick white socks he got for her last winter because two of her toes refused to circulate blood in the cold and became numb. Hers and his. She glanced up at the window, saw him, smiled. He smiled back.
And he realised that the thorns were a prerequisite to the bed of rosebushes they had built together.
I’ve just finished re-reading Jane Eyre, while simultaneously reading a modern day romance written in such a fashion as the past version of myself would have scoffed at.
I am no longer a judgemental prick, however, and I can appreciate that someone made an effort to publish a book which a lot of people DID like. Even though I might think the quality is cheap and the style of writing needs not one, but several, revisions.
Bronte herself, narrating as Jane, stipulated that the poetry of the ‘reader’s’ time was far beneath that of a time preceding it, as were the fashions, the literature and the conduct of the youth.
I couldn’t help smiling at the idea that through time, we have all had the same disdainful sentiments pertaining to the modern fashions of the times in which we live.
I was rejected from a writing job this week. It felt heartbreaking to me, a real blow to my self esteem. I thought I was good at what I do, but the comments I received on the piece I had written were horrifically brutal. And true. They said it was fluff and drivel and ‘poorly written’. This is the thing I thought I was good at, so to be told I was so inadequate at it made me feel absolutely rubbish.
But I also think I am not so green in the sense that it didn’t crush me totally. I was crushed, for sure. I felt the weight of my ineptitude sitting malignantly on my shoulders. But within this I also felt the small candle of resolve, and it did not blow out.
Okay. Ok. How can I use this to my benefit? Did I learn something? I did. I learnt not to write drivel and fluff. To make every word count. I also learnt a bit about hot tubs – not that that would benefit me in any way, nor be of use anytime soon, but I still learnt something. Will I give up trying to get a job that pays for my writing? Certainly not.
I am sitting here trying to write the ninth post, and my rather heavy three year old has planted herself firmly and solidly on my lap. Her curly hair isn in my face, and she is insisting that she would like to go through all the videos on my phone that I have taken of her and her brother.
I often find I cannot think straight when my kids are around me. They are constantly clamouring for my attention – look at this, see how fast I can run, Mama did you see this cake I made you, can you help me with this puzzle, did you know that slugs come out in the rain, what happens if sextillion slugs came up the sink while we were sleeping, Mama can I talk now she already talked enough, Mama do you know… Mama I don’t want to die, Mama I need to learn how to be a girl who listens to you, Mama I don’t want to be a snail…
We haven’t woken up to a thin coating of delicate ice crystals on the petals of late-October flowers. Not yet.
But soon frost with blow her icy breath and the night under the stars will be bejewelled. Glistening pavements and privet leaves dusted, coated, delicately enshrouded.
Day two and I am hanging by a thread! A silken spidery web of a thread. So fragile it will break at a sharp exhale. Of which I have released many. Sharp exhales. Followed by sharp inhales, breath catching in my throat, hyper-vigilance because a five year old boy is now throwing himself off high things and his clumsy three year old sister likes to think she can do anything.
She can.
She is invincible.
One is at three, didn’t you know?
I meant to make my month’s writing a many-part piece of my ever-ongoing story that I never managed to finish and yet is still knocking about in my brain. It wants release damnit.
I see it everywhere in the gloomy muddied painting that is the end of autumn and the beginning of our long and sombre winter up here in the Northern Hemisphere. The clouds blend into the horizon and the bare branches of trees are like thin paintbrush strokes. And geese storm the skies in their v formations and the roads are one day ablaze with the yellows and browns of autumn and the next day they are piled with soggy heaps of mulch. It’s romantic weather. It’s biting and cold but the beauty breathes through the very atmosphere, and you’re starved of sunlight, so you feed yourself on the muddy watercolours of foggy mornings and you devour the way the trees sit on distant hills, the way the muddy grassy slopes lie against each other until they fade into a grey cloud.
Perhaps day 3 will yield something! I hope you have had a warm drink and some human company.
I am thirty. Thrifty at thirty. Mind-drifty at thirty.
I look old but my mind is still 12. Isn’t that what everybody says? My daughter, who is 3, asks why I am so old, and my son enquires about the technology in ‘my time’ – which I don’t think is old at all, but I now slowly realise is redundant. Landline telephones? Redundant. In my home they are anyway. Which is awful. My children ought to know how to pick up the telephone and dial a number to the dial tone in the speaker and call their grandparents. Landline in my parents’ home? Redundant also. Non existent! Everybody has a mobile phone now.
And don’t get me started with mobile phones. We used to call them ‘mobiles’ but now we just call them ‘phones’ since they have replaced the real phones we used to use. The thing with our phones today is that they suck our faces right in, so we exist in two planes. The virtual plane where information seems to be pounding us at twenty million hits per second, and the real life plane where days plod on as usual and sunrises and sunsets are not as exquisite as those curated by the professional photo-editors of the virtual plane, and yet when we manage to extricate ourselves for a moment or two, the wind smells so fresh and the grass so green.
And people still watch DVDs? Use CDs? Videos?!
I am thirty and I feel terribly ancient and almost desperate, clinging to several threads but not knowing which one to pull on. I feel dragged in many directions, like that corporate punishment of yore, only the pain is in my mind. It manifests as a fear. It rises only in the dead of night, beyond the witching hour and in the moments of suspense before dawn puts her gentle, yet creeping fingers on the edge of the horizon. When there is a stillness in the atmosphere and a heaviness in the limbs and when oxygen seems scarce. It tells me I am nothing, a speck, will not amount to anything, will never have a legacy, will never achieve like I so desire to. And then the sun rises and so do the responsibilities and I shoulder them again like a rucksack only there are metal chains and financial worry.
But time is dashing madly along, pulling us all with it, backwards through hedges, bumping our heads on the bare autumnal branches of our lives. And some of us learn to enjoy the ride, and others become upset that the bumps are causing valuable things to fall out of our pockets.
Like memory.
I took both my kids for their vaccinations yesterday. The nurse there said to me, well lady your older child is all up to date on his vaccinations.
Am I going mad?!
He certainly isn’t, I told her, I brought him over and he was poorly so we said we would rebook! No, I can categorically say he has absolutely been vaccinated. It’s all written down here on our system, the batch number of the vaccine and the date.
Oh my goodness me! I put my hands on my face, how on earth do I not remember this?!
I don’t know, she said, her eyes still trained on her computer screen.
Is this thirty? Memory loss?
Anyway. Happy NanoWrimo. I am determined to do it this year. Adding another thread to my already filled hands.
Ocean Bream 