Bright blooms on a dark night

The hills are darkling and my thoughts are meandering, so tonight I will introduce you to my new postcards and let them speak for themselves.

If they take your fancy, they're for sale through my Etsy shop (the column on the right) and at Amy's Flowers, Chagford - my favourite ever florist who always seems to have some little offcut whenever Pickle comes in. Tonight Pickle is sleeping under the sedative influence of a beautiful pink gerbera bloom which needed a home :o).

Thinking Negative

Pickle's going to be an astronaut and is quite serious about training. So far this has included eating extra green veg and walking further. I would love to find a way to include toilet training, after a bit of a relapse, but she has chosen the one profession where you really are supposed to pee in your pants. Two friends have agreed to join her, so watch this space for progress reports on our all-girl team to the moon. [At the time of publication, there is some possibility of her being a roofer instead. Either way, she's aiming high.]

I thought we'd have a spacious and relaxed summer this year, but we just can't stop having adventures. 

We've been to stay with my sister's large and wonderful family, which is an adventure in itself, and we all went to see Happy's Circus, which was brilliant. They're aimed at schools and I'll be trying to persuade Chagford School to invite them. The kids were all entranced and Pickle couldn't stop herself standing when something extra exciting happened.

With only one night to recover from that, we flew off to Jersey to see my good friend and her daughter. 

Always a fan of the budget holiday, we camped in their garden and had a lovely time.

We played in big rock pools (Pickle still not being a fan of the sea)

went rock climbing

spent a whole day at the Gerald Durrell Wildlife Park (I can't do zoos)

enjoyed the company of Uma the coral snake

went down huge slides

got genuinely lost in a maize maze

and generally had a very lovely time.

We flew home (Pickle opting to leave the plane halfway, but being talked out of it by me), washed some pants and drew breath, then off to my parents' home in sunny Somerset, where we had a ride on a proper 'woo woo' steam train

saw sheepdogs at various stages of training confuse a lot of sheep and ducks, and some amazing birds of prey, including this lannar falcon

and Pickle showed off her Forest School skills.

Meanwhile, I can now steer a car a bit, as long as I don't have to go round a corner while changing gears and have even done 70mph on the A30, then later discovered a bee in the car.

And as if that weren't stressful enough, I've got my BRCA1 gene test result this Monday. If it's positive, I think I'll have a double mastectomy as soon as possible, then my ovaries removed when I'm forty (in five years). So let's think negative :o).

In the palm of her hand

 I don't know how many of you folk pray, in any kind of way. I'm not sure if this counts, but I do sometimes get very clear and consciously set an intention. I did it the other day. And I did it out loud, which always makes it worse.

Pickle is now wearing this T-shirt as a nightie

Just in case

Much has happened. Much has not happened and I am still thrumming with that loss. But much has happened and it has been good.

On the anniversary of Thomas's death, I climbed the hill behind our house, YakTrax gripping incredibly in the foot-deep snow, pack on my back and Pickle on my shoulders. It was a hard climb, but I needed to know I could still put one foot in front of the other. I needed to see myself look at an ascent too steep, too slippery, too high and feel myself too tired, too introverted, too laden. Then I needed to see myself get to the top. Because sometimes I have to make life very, very simple for myself and metaphor is so direct, as the first woman to feel her hide-skirt fill with heat from a fire would tell you.

At the top was a gathering of good souls, clustered around a fire, warming hands and faces and bellies with tea. It was so quiet in the snow that I paused at a distance, unwilling to join this little shuffling crowd. A friend from behind swept us in and there we were, Pickle now inside my coat (Thomas's coat once) and me in a swarm of words and love. We planted trees for Thomas, for all of us. Here's my dad helping Pickle plant an oak. I just can't stop myself thinking, Thomas would have loved this.

And as Pickle's birthday last year came so close on the diving heels of the funeral; so this year that juncture felt a squeeze, but not so tight I couldn't breathe.

Here's my threedom fighter delightedly receiving a Granny-knitted Gruffalo. The medicine in that smile could heal the world.

Spring came, a bit. It didn't stay long, but we had a quick dalliance with crocuses and tulips, and primroses like I have rarely seen sprouted from every crack and cranny. Pickle, ever with a stick (a genetic trait) and often with a grin, played the fey girl through the churchyard and made this day seem a little warmer than it truly was.

With spring; Easter. This is the first year I've allowed Pickle to eat all the chocolate she's been given and, of course, she loved it and has been asking ever since when it will be Easter again.

And then, when we had all given up hope and resigned ourselves to a dim and dismal year, the sun! Actual, hot, blazing, one-layer, outside, urge-to-run, bright, shit-it-burns sun! For weeks! Two weeks! I am thoroughly a better person for being shined upon so magnificently and it gave us something to do when we were in chicken pox quarantine. We're waiting for the peonies and roses, but the aquilegia and bluebells have, like the primroses, come up in storms after their long soak. Enough for lungfuls of scent. Enough to soothe this heart. And the dandelions... I have written before about the wild world of our garden. I had just got to the point, as I do each year, of feeling our dandelion lawn is really a bit of an embarrassment, a bit naughty, makes me look like I can't do it properly (do what? I don't quite know); when a flock of a dozen goldfinches and a greenfinch each landed on a stem, bending it only so slightly, and pecked at the dandelion seeds. Every day for a week they came, always with the one greenfinch, and, with apologies to those of my neighbours as keep an ordered, business-like garden, I'm now as likely to pull up those flowers as I am to pull the teeth from a lion.

I now have geek-chic braces on my teeth of which I am surprisingly fond. Pickle is delighted to have chosen the colour of my bands and I am delighted she has not chosen green. (They're a pale pink.) Every six weeks we travel by Gappy van to Torbay for The Tightening (yes - ow) and if it is a lovely day we pootle down to the sea. Pickle is still very wary of this wettest of moors and rightly unnerved by the crashing and sucking of waves, but we take a look and find small wonders for the corners of our home (which will soon be entirely spherical if we continue) and breathe the differently clear air of the ocean, and I send love back with the tide, because the girl who's read so many stories still wants him to be able to hear and can't stop saying it just in case.

Wedding Poems

It is the anniversary of Thomas's death soon. All words are flown, and with them levity. My friends, I wish I could make possible your desire to be with me; but in this I am alone, even as I feel your love. 

For want of direction, I re-read the poems, written by me, which my good friend Sam read at our wedding. Here they are:

Poem for Thomas

I walk in to your study to tell you I love you.

You have your headphones on and your back to me.

I stand behind you and tell you anyway.

I tell you that you make my days, my life, special;

that I will try, when we have a family,

to be what a family needs me to be.

I will try to be bold when the urge to hide tugs me away.

I will try to remember that your faults are few and insignificant.

It does not matter if the milk does not return to the fridge.

It does not matter if you do not know what I told you this morning.

It does not matter if you never buy a birthday card.

It matters, more than my heart can hold,

the truth of it spilling down my cheeks and neck,

that you love me;

that you stand with me.

As I tell you all this

you nod your head to your private rhythm

because of course you know already.

The urge to kiss you is strong

but I can’t stop watching you,

wondering at you.

I tell you I think you are brilliant.

You nod harder.

I laugh.

You turn and grin.

He and I

The day is old and beautiful.

The music stopped a while ago.

He and I dance in the living room,

Dancing slow for my knees and his heart -

A lifetime of dancing and loving paying its toll.

He and I dance our forgotten dreams,

Lost hopes,

Flown children.

He and I dance as darkness falls on our shared life;

Smiling because it’s been so good

Crying because so little is left to do.

He and I keep dancing,

Keep daring to know all of each other,

Keep dancing towards death,

But all the while dancing together in life.

He and I

Old and beautiful

 Thomas on Our Honeymoon

Speak Your Love

This is how I survive. In the evenings I work. Depending on my mood, I have a background of the Alan Yentob series 'Imagine', some wonderment or merriment from Radio 4 or, ahem, 'The X Factor' and I hunch (decorously, of course) over my knees (because my desk is too overburdened with my 'to do' pile of... I really don't know what's in it) and make tiny shapes with my pens over and over again until an image has resolved itself, or words, or, best, the name of some child who will get their very own original artwork for Christmas. I am truly grateful for such happy-making work.

This, above, is quite a different thing. I painted it years ago, but only very recently have I been happy to let it find a new home. Here's the story of its being:

I'd spent the afternoon in the blazing sun, digging my own grave. There were about twenty of us and I was surprised to be the slowest digger, but I got my grave good and deep and anxiously waited for sunset so I could get in it.

I lay (snuggled in a sleeping bag) and watched as the planks, then the tarp, were placed over me. As the spades of earth landed and blocked out the light, my heart was hammering and it took some focused breathing not to scramble back to the surface.

And then, against all my expectations, I got very calm. Instead of feeling like a corpse, I felt held, comforted, by the Earth, like I was in her womb. I have rarely felt so safe in all my life.

And another thing: an odd experience I could only later explain as like being a Russian doll. I was in the womb of the Earth and in my womb was a... oh! So that explains why I had no energy to dig and the sun made me feel nauseous.

I had wanted a baby for a while and not conceived, so this was definitely a welcome surprise. All that night I lay in Gaia's embrace, sending and receiving love and happiness with this boy (I was sure) in my belly.

Once I was home, I painted this. It is an honouring of the Cosmic Mother who holds us all, our beautiful planet mother Gaia and of us human mothers who bring life into the world. Sacred all.

This is one of those lovely name signs - in fact, the most popular design on Etsy. (Obviously I don't mean in the whole of Etsy. I mean in my teensy-tiny little Etsy shop.)

Some tree studies I wasn't even sure about putting up for sale because they were too much fun to be 'proper'. (I know, I know, but I have these crazy thoughts. And at least I didn't listen.) They barely landed in my shop before two of them sold - one in a breathtaking six hours! The one above is the only one left, but I'm enjoying it in my home, so that's okay.

Wave, below, is just so pleasing to me that I haven't tried to sell it before now, but I need wall-space for new paintings. The ink is crawling across the canvasses each night and before long the oils will make a comeback.

 And last, the thing I would say if I had one second to address the world:

After my husband died, I was so desperately grateful that we had always spoken our love; even when we were angry; even when it was obvious, so there could be no doubt on either side, or in the mind of our daughter.
So when people asked me how they could make things better, I would ask them to speak their love with their special people.
Now I'm asking you.