This ‘now’ does not exist. Even as I notice it, it vanishes. The poppy does not pause in its drinking of sunlight. That background hum is not pollination, but cars rushing to somewhere, or maybe away from. Vehicles peopled by spirits – angry, petulant, tired, or – who knows? –maybe joyful, excited. It depends upon whether they are rushing away from, or towards.
In my now, the coffee is cooling. Colding, rather. It is already cool. The shadows of my hair, where it has escaped my hat, dance on the table cloth. A cloth of cream linen, embroidered with baskets of flowers and green garlands. My mother’s work.
I have no idea how long she worked on this piece, no idea what she thought about as she did so. I never really knew my mother. I knew her voice, her face, her moods, but her inner world was never mine to enter. I was never invited in.
Was she pleased with this piece when she finished it and ironed it smooth with her non-steaming flat iron? Was there any sense of satisfaction? Did she ever even look at it again, put it to use? The only thing I know for certain is that she did not envisage it, this table cloth, in this 2025 now.
I know for certain that as her fingers worked those brown and green and yellow and orange threads into satin-stitched beautiful simplicity, she was not thinking that one day the cloth would be lain on a
rusting grey bistro table in a garden at breakfast time. She would not have thought that perhaps it would lie beneath books and glass and stone paperweights against the morning breeze. She would not have imagined a wolf-faced mug of colding coffee. She would not have imagined her daughter, now in her own sixties, hunkered over such a table, and such a cloth, with a pen in her hand, feeling the sun on her back, and reaching back through time to touch what might have been on her mind
and heart as she pulled those threads into those patterns.
I often think of my mother, about how she was at the age I am now. Did she ever do the opposite? Did she ever wonder how I would be, when I reached the age she then was? Where I would be, what I would be doing, who I would be with, or without? Or was she more likely thinking about her own mother – her father – her brothers – her elder sisters – already gone, long ago some of them, when she picked up this cloth and her needle. Perhaps she was the age I am now. Maybe older. Did she feel content as she sat alone with her needlework, or was there some unfulfilled ache, unspoken.
There is a quiet patience needed for embroidery, just as there is for motherhood. I do not have it.
She tried to teach me. I was unteachable.
That now has gone. The one with my mother pulling threads, tying knots, cutting neatly the ending of things.
I come back into the present now. Present continuous. Everything still changing. The blackbird sings in the holly tree. An air ambulance flies low towards the hospital – a life in the balance. Wind chimes chink, like cables against metallic masts in a marina. The pale green minute-hand chicks its way around the face of my watch. A large fly is briefly trapped as the wind blows up the cloth from the table. I pause to appreciate shadows: of grass against the garage wall, of the Gingko against the fence, the wisps of my hair still shadow-dancing on the table.
LATER (another now)
I come back to now – in this continuous present – a different now. I smile at a new memory: Lise smiling in a corridor because she is remembering a small joy from yesterday, the discovery that the torii gate is within my garden and she could walk through it into that other space, that she could follow the very short, rickety path and sit quietly.
It is rightly said that we should not seek to live in the past, but equally I claim that the past is as continuous as the present. I claim that bringing yesterday’s inhalation of serenity or joy, however small, into today’s moment of waiting for something else to happen, is a precious thing. Smiles relived beget smiles in the now, that might themselves be relived again.
What can possibly be wrong with reliving a smile?
A LITTLE LATER (again)
I swim lengths of the pool. Mind wanders when the only job it is given is to remember this number until the next turn, and then increase it by one, and remember that number until I touch the wall again, and increase…and so on…for fifty minutes or so. Mind wants to play. Mind wants to work.This remembering of a number and increasing by one is not work, not play. So Mind decides to be disruptive.
It throws up the fact that my childhood neighbour, the one always with the honorific Mrs rather than the more affectionate, but equally respectful, Auntie, the one whose forename I didn’t know for thirty years, Mrs Farmer, never Auntie Hazel, though she treated me as an adopted niece for all those years and more, she went to school with Ellis Peters, the creator of Cadfael. Four degrees of separation between me and Derek Jacobi. Mind smiles at memory and calculation.
I bring myself back to strokes and breathing. Mind throws up memory of swimming with my actual Aunt, in pools, in the sea, decades ago. More than half a lifetime ago. Memories of glittering water, and sunlight, and her smile, even the blue costume she was wearing, and the silly flouncy skirted one I had that I loved so much.
Mind reminds me of a beach party.
Mind is bored by counting lengths, until the increased number reaches the level, when it can start calculating downwards, the decreasing number still intended.
I come back to momentary present. I acknowledge the preciousness of that near-hour in the water. I feel the movement of my limbs. I focus on my breath. I feel a deep sense of being there. I (again) acknowledge the role this pool has played in my recovery from grief, my transition from what was to what is, from a painful period into a contented one…with no actual boundary between the two. The past and the present are both continuous.
A momentary now involving nothing more (or indeed less) complicated than breathing, and moving my limbs in a way that propels me forward, and remembering a number for a minute, and then the next one in direct sequence. A momentary now involving a certain degree of sensory deprivation: my goggles are fogged, I can scarcely see; my hearing is muted whenever my ears submerge; all that is felt upon my skin is water.
Momentary now shifts into satisfaction, into the heaving of a body out of the water, into the walk beneath the trees and along the streets, of noticing shade and sunshine.
Now becomes eating lunch in the middle of the afternoon. It becomes receiving a payment for the passing on of things I do not need. It becomes a sharing of the proceeds. It becomes, once again, sitting in the garden at a cloth-covered table. The poppy has had its day, shed its petals. The blackbird still calls to me from the top of the holly tree.
