Moments

It was just a moment, really.

Everything is.

Part of a conversation beside a ford on an October Tuesday, around lunchtime. It had rained during the morning, and then the rain had stopped. By the time we got to the river, the ford, the water meadow, the sun had burned off the remaining cloud. We watched a coupling pair of dragonflies dance in the air and dive to the water’s surface. Mating or fighting, laying eggs or drinking. All or none of the above.

It was just a moment. A moment in which leaves fell, singly, and floated like boats on the eddies, uncertain of which way to go. A moment of silence, until the screaming of jets shattered it like some great crystal tower falling to earth.

A Sunday morning: I am reading about Lost Japan¹, about Kyoto and temples and Nara and Zen gardens and how everything beautiful and pure evolves into something less than it was, when the light changes. I look through the window to watch the sudden rain, streaming like chaff behind a
war-plane it is ram-rod straight until it is caught by the unseen wind, which shifts the stream from directly vertical to a left-slant diagonal. This is rain as string, not as drops. This is rain caught by shafts of light from an unseen sun. This is rain that I am only watching because of the change in the light it caused.

Only when I start to watch do I also start to listen. I cannot hear it. The angle of descent means that it does not hit my windows. Double-glazing means I do not hear it land.

The rains stops and the light changes again. There is a quality of light that you only get after rain, perhaps only after a heavy autumnal downpour. The sun has not yet completely broken through the cloud. The light that reaches the ground is reflected back up from wet roads and puddles and water-holding leaves. The trees are underlit in the middle of the day. The breeze continues and the beech shakes itself like a dog emerging from a river.

I go back to the lost beauty of Japan. I learn about fox spirits in the old Shinto religion. But I suspect I am feeling those things differently because of Norfolk rain, and the beech tree in the garden across the road.

I spend an hour going through a couple of boxes of old clothes. The ones I kept because I really want to wear them again. The ones that in the last two decades I have expanded out of and am only now beginning to shrink back into. Hopefully. Intentionally.

I go to the boxes because I am in need of motivation. It’s a form of window shopping because I know how far I am away from most of what is in there. I don’t really expect to be able, yet, to begin to take things out of them.

A moment of delight when a ruched black blouse actually fits, and deep joy when I climb into a sparkling, sequinned, embroidered skirt that will go so well with it. A moment that sends me off into the whole spiral of "will I ever wear it and what about shoes?" I abandon that line of thought and prance in front of the hall mirror. I am six year sold again, stealing a moment in my mother’s high-heeled shoes.

In reality they weren’t that high. Mam never wore high heels, she didn’t have the length of foot to be able to, but they felt that way to me when I had stolen into her bedroom and sneaked them out of their box. Shoes still kept in their box had their own kind of glamour. Mine tend to be either scattered in the corner of the kitchen or ditched into the ottoman in the hall.

The point of diving into my old clothes boxes was to motivate me to keep going on my get-fitter, get-thinner, get-healthier campaign.

Naturally most things ended up re-boxed, but a surprising amount was reclaimed. I have a pile of ironing to do. Trousers, pairs, three. A dress – and the jacket that goes with it – summery. A pair of leggings, that almost fit. A blouse or two. A souvenir from Bhutan that I may never have worn and am still not sure how I will. T-shirts.

How long is a moment? The box-delving is an expanded moment, that has other moments within it. There is the pink-purple dress I wore in Cuba, on Valentine’s day, a long way away from my lover. There is a gorgeous mustard gown, still with its label, that I do not remember buying. There are work blouses that take me back to days in the office. A short dress I bought in Birmingham intentionally to be worn with jeans. An embroidered Kurta that takes me back to being stranded in Kolkata.

There is the putting of most of these things back into the box, with a promise-to-self of “by this time next year!”

There are also things that sort-of fit, or almost, but realistically I have no desire to wear again. Too long, too short, too ugly, too formal, too not-me now. So more comes out of the boxes only to go straight into the donation bag. There’s a different kind of pleasure in that.

The boxes, plural, are now a box, singular.

Monday morning. I danced in a synagogue. Is that even allowed?

We’re approaching Halloween and our teacher is Mexican, so Halloween isn’t so much a day as a season. She starts early. She starts with music and humour and compulsory dressing-up. I’m sure there is something a little bit weird about dancing The Time Warp in a temple – but all I feel in the moment is the hilarity of it – the childish silliness that we really should never lose. I recall a quote (probably misquoting, forgive me) from the Talmud that goes something like Come the day of judgement we will all be called to account for all of the wonderful things that were put in this world that we failed to enjoy.

That feels like justification enough to go into temple and dance, to sweat and smile and laugh and be as irreverent as it is possible to be. Because this, too, is community.

I only thought about that afterwards.

A lot of moments are like that. I only catch them after they have passed. Inside of them…I am just inside of them. So then I take a whole day and try to think of it as moments…

#

I wake in the dark. Consider how my body is, hands on the lower dantian yin on yang on yin. I stretch. It is dark, but I had planned to be up early. There is deliberately no clock in this room. I cannot idly check the time, I have to reach for it. I do so. It is two minutes away from the alarm. I fail to cancel it before it sounds.

I pause on the edge of darkness. The day hasn’t caught up with me yet.

#
I make coffee. I open my journal, in which I have nothing new to say.

#

Walking down the lane, mist rising beyond the trees. Autumn, at last. Leaves glistening in puddles, and it is cold. I’m not dressed for cold. I’m dressed for rain.

#

At the bus-stop, I think about all the people in all the vehicles: in their cars, their trucks, on their bicycles, their motorbikes, their scaffold-lorries, their refrigerated things, the occasional camper van, a bus going the other way, the white vans with and without their logos. I think about the walking people, the mothers pushing their buggies, school-girls with their homework in their bags, wearing as close a thing to their uniform as current fashion will allow. I think about emotion. If each of these could show me how they are really feeling, right this minute, as they wait with me or speed past me, what colour would they be. What colour am I today?

#

Waiting for a train. I walk up and down the platform. Just keeping warm, just exercise, getting those steps in, but every time I reach the outer end, I wonder if I am on camera. I wonder if someone watches me and worries about my next move, especially as I hear the next train coming in. But I am just walking. To keep warm. To get my steps in. I turn around the far lamppost and walk back up the platform. Does someone in front of a screen breathe a sigh of relief?

#

On the train, I watch the land slip by. Trees. Hedgerows. That amazing garden near Roughton Road, down in the hollow, I want to know those people, just to say: I love that! What you’ve done. And can I maybe come and visit?

Then there are horses, donkeys, first glimpses of the sea. It’s a familiar route. The barn with its collapsing roof. A car on a lane that I had forgotten existed.

#

Cley. Standing outside waiting for a door to be opened and being known when I step inside. Without my having to ask my lost/left property from last week is handed back, neatly wrapped and labelled. Your pen is in there too, Caz says. A hand-made pen I would have been sorry to have lost.

When I buy my coffee, the volunteer whose name I ought to know by now, knows to put the milk straight in, not worry about jugs and stuff.

Small things that make feel like I belong.

#

We walked up to where the gorse had burned. A possibly ancient thing, a natural event, a recurrent one, that none of us had ever experienced before, that made us think about the future. Extrapolating.

The lark field too had a look so different from what we are used to. Half of it given to nest cover of brassica and chicory and self-seeded flowers and everything uncut and wilding – the other half showing the more familiar tender shoots of barley that might survive the winter.

Today no-one mentioned the larks, that were up there, doing their singing job as always.

We came to look at the aftermath of fire. Black gorse. Burned and beautiful.

Pine woods, untouched. The ground soft beneath our feet.

What survived and what did not.

A view of the marsh and the sea, that a week ago would have been hidden. Black cows grazing.

On the ridge top, chestnut trees, stunted, sprawling, like beached octopi, limbs extended, touching ground, curling back up, happily shedding their anemone shells of encased chestnuts.

Below the edge of the wood, in a patch of gorse, lay a large metal bucket. Rusted. Years of abandonment . Slow return to earth. Another untold story. Why is it there? How and when and who and why? Was it carried up full of fruit for a picnic, or tools for a work-stint? And why not back down again? Was it a bunch of hippies or pagans or witches or kids or workmen or travellers or tourists or some other random collective bringing up a party…did they use it as a punch bowl, an ice
box, or a fire pit, and afterwards decide it wasn’t worth the carrying back?

Or was it just forgotten. Did someone say I’ll go back for it tomorrow, and simply never did?

What have I left behind in the by ways of my life, forgotten?

#

Up there, somewhere between the burnt-out gorse and the pinewood and field edges we lose a couple of people (temporarily). Writers scattered like wraiths. We loose track of time and insist on not keeping to the clock.

When we regroup, no-one reads, because we have too much to say about how it is, and was, and memories and maybes and how this was not an ordinary writing outside day, this was…ok…and not ok…not sure…still processing.

#

I travel home. More views from a train: horses paddocked in half-cut fields, burned-out sunflowers, starlings rising in synchronised clouds. Actual clouds, the rain moving in.

#

Walk towards Castle Meadow – as huge a misnomer as you can imagine for a city-street that acts primarily as a bus station. Drizzle convinces me that walking all the way home is not recommended. The bus is on time, and the rain follows shortly after. Serious, intentional rain.

A reminder that we are into the turning time of the year. The drought lingers, but the rain has returned, and perhaps we’ll remember to be grateful for a wet Winter. Let it rain. Often and slowly enough for the land to drink it, for it permeate rather than rush away.

Let me remember to be grateful if it does. I know I will forget. Like everyone else I will resist the rain. And it won’t care.

#

Home. Fish in the oven. Blinds drawn against the closing in of night. Fairy lights.

Talk to a friend about life and love and loss. Take a walk in the dark.

Pick up my notebook, open the laptop, try to make a little sense of it all.

¹ Lost Japan, by Alex Kerr, ISBN978-0-141-97974-8