This isn’t about today. It is about last week. I say that because I changed the title in the edit. It started as “rainy Sundays in February” as if every wet Sunday were the same as any other one. That is not so. This was one Sunday, last week as I write, maybe a year ago as you read. Or longer away if my words survive that long.
I’m awake early trying to figure out why the number seven is so important and what the door meant - images from the dreamscape. Because I have no idea, I get up, despair briefly at what fruit scones have done to the numbers on the scales (while also knowing I will eat the other two today) and make coffee. I have a day, a Sunday indeed – which is a gods-given excuse to do as little as you feel like. An unplanned day. Imagine the never-ending prairie spaciousness of such a day, even though it isn’t gold and cobalt, more like pewter and gravel, it is still wide open and all my own.
No-one will visit. No-one will call. I don’t have to check the phone.
I sit in the corner of my living room, because that’s where the best light is, and listen to the feint sound of car engines, of tyres on glistening roads, of unknown lives passing by.
Watching the ripples in puddles, I wonder why it seems to rain harder on this side of the close – harder but more slowly – larger, fewer drops. Does that plum tree over there function like a sieve? Shaking and sifting rain into finer droplets?
Alternating between Natalie Goldberg and Marcus Aurelius and poets I’ve never heard of, I know I’m scavenging for the compost heap. Suddenly it feels incumbent upon me to swap my seat cushions around, and in doing so I notice the small bottle of sand from a beach in Lanzarote. Sand taken in exchange for scattered ashes.
Not by me. The ashes I scattered went into the river, into the sea, into the circulating everything. I may swim in them again some day. I swim in some of the waters that took them away. Meanwhile ashes I did not see went to a favourite beach, and some sand came back. The beach and you might have been the only ones to know, except you wanted me to share in the sand, and I think it is important enough to keep the detail alive, because one day someone will throw that bottle of sand away without knowing what it is or why - for a time, perhaps for eternity - it is / was important.
It is important because I loved my cousin. It is important because it is part of the link in the chain that means I am now transcribing words from eighty years ago, simple words, that also matter.
I move between notebooks. I move between rooms. I move from keyboard to pen and back again.
The keyboard has staccato music of its own. I've abandoned the looming PC and large screen...there is more space on the desk, more space around the cyber-page. There is someting here - an idea about what this means - I remember my first laptop, my first i-Pad (office kit), how much easier it was to write on those - by easier I mean freer, less restrained. I remember that I wrote my LLM dissertation first draft on an old Samsung laptop on the dining table, and only went to the desk to do the final edits. I have not thought about these things, but today they are taking on meaning.
I back-burner the idea and go back to the pen.
The feel of the oak, the grain of the barrel of my new favourite pen, hand-made, a birthday present, a unique thing: this piece of tree in my hand, decades of Summers and Winters, of budding and leaf-fall, flowering and fruiting and weathering the storms. It will take time for me to understand its language, while I caress grains that used to be rings. Goldberg says that writers have a responsibility to the trees. I have my own responsibilities, because my room - I'm back in the living room now, away from my desk - the room is full of wood-made things. I hold the pen still, and sigh into the beauty that I have decided to hold in here – the sensuousness in the shape of things, the way the pen sits in my hand and asks to be stroked, and the veneer of the display cabinet, the solidity of the mirror frame and the way the coffee table squats on open curvaceous legs, on such dainty en pointe toes.
A pause by the window: the bravery of the single clump of snowdrops beside the rockery, shivering in the wind and laden with rain, pretending to be demure with their bowed heads that simply serve to hide their true thoughts. Lamplights in the gloom.
Perhaps they called down the snow…because even as I was wondering about white February flowers, the rain turned sleety and suddenly it was snowing. As I lunched on rice noodles and spinach, the sky shook out feathers of ice. I didn’t think it would lay: too warm, too wet. It pretended that it could and I suddenly wanted it to. If Winter was going to linger, then I wanted it to do so in whiteness.
It snowed all afternoon. A wet Sunday became something a little more magical.
Only a little. Reality lurked around the edges.
I learned that housework is easier when you have no plan to get it done. I do the ironing while Miss Marple solves a version of the Secret of Chimneys, which I learn has little to do with the plot of a book I have not read (yet). The laundry finds its way into soakings and machine washing in between real-life murder investigations on a different tv channel. The snow stops falling and what had landed melts away: turn your thoughts back to Spring, it seems to be saying.
So I do. I think about clearing the winter things from my altar. I think about buying daffodils and bright yellow roses.
