Then, as now (Part 2 of 5)

confessions of a ten-, thirty- and seventy-year old

Part Two - lessons in lessness learned lately

Sunrise

The sun has just found the gap between the hillsides.

Already, I’m a mile from the house, down by the half-hidden stone bridge that carries the three-quarters-hidden field track across the happy, overgrown stream. I’m watching gurgles and slides flow out from under the tunnel of the bridge.

Light glints, catching the ripple crests of the giggling water just beyond the shadow of the bridge. And then come the bramble stems, some thicker than my arm and with thorns bigger (and sharper) than my bitten thumbnails. They reach across from bank to bank, making their own, dark, green, dappled tunnel.

I take off my boots and socks, paddling into the water, still ice cold from last night. Carefully choosing which slippery stones to stand on, I reach forward with my right big toe and gently lift up a wide, smooth likely looking stone.

A silver flash of a flat fish shimmers as it flees to new safety, effortlessly clearing the small wall of rocks and stones mysteriously assembled in front of it.

In one of my books, it says that flat fish have both eyes on one side of their heads. I’d like to be able to see that for myself – that’s why yesterday me and the two best friends in my head had built the dam here to try and catch one.

Part of me is relieved that it hasn’t worked. I still have occasional shivers of shame at the memory of trapping, killing and skinning a mole. That was a long two years ago when I was only eight and away from home at boarding school. I’d seen it as a token of my mature and yet masculine love for the older girl I’d had a crush on back home and sent it by post, secretly, or the housemaster who checked all our letters would have not let it go.

(Author’s note: Despite its extraordinary velvety blackness, she’d been entirely unimpressed. At least, she’d never mentioned it. Not even ten years ago, when we’d met again at her younger sister’s untimely wake. I’m pretty sure she’d never known that her sister and I had kissed under this bridge during that summer, fifty years earlier.)

ºººº

I’ve been asleep in the chair, stirring now as, through the sun room window, light from the incandescent orange ball warms my face with the touch of an angel. The sun is perfectly framed between the two rounded hills across the village valley. Small white clouds float across the sky, mirrored by the small white sheep on the hillsides. I train the binoculars on them as they meander about, seemingly unconcerned by their imminent fate.

Down by the churchyard, there’s a flash of orange as a dog fox crosses open space. I sweep the glasses down hoping to see it magnified and instead catch a flash of flesh in the window of the one of the village’s terraced houses below us. I blush because I keep the glasses on a couple’s intimacy for two or three more guilty seconds than I should do.

Back to the dog fox, which has now disappeared.

For a moment, I sense a flicker of panic about the time and the day’s schedule. It subsides as I remember that today I am working on The 1985-90 Marketing Plan. I have no meetings booked and nowhere to go. Apart from the office, of course, because that’s where I work. Tiredness in my bones is covered over with a sense of task-oriented purpose for the day, ideas and half-formed plans coalescing from my semiconsciousness.

Until anxiety sidles its way in as the sun climbs away from the side of the hill. He won’t like the plan I’m building and he definitely won’t like the business-saving strategy I’m going to propose; it’s all sales, sales, sales with him and bugger the margins or the human costs. He justifies his lavish taste in Lotus sports cars with turnover alone. I’m not going to go along with what he wants me to put in my marketing plan. And that will be a stormy ride.

The garden invites me to linger longer at home this morning and even perhaps attend to the grass that needs cutting - but this delight will have to wait until Saturday when, so far, I’m anticipating a work-free weekend, mostly with pleasure. At least I shan’t have to tolerate him for two whole days.

ºººº

In this kitchen, right now, I’m making a fresh pot of tea and watching the chameleon sky as it morphs from its night attire into daylight finery. I’m briefly amused by my own flouncy description of this change. I chide myself with both affection and compassion, “Finally, at three score and ten, old boy, you’re a WRITER, dahhlinng!”

Perhaps I always was.

It’s not the same kitchen I snuck out of through the back door sixty years ago.

It’s not the same house from which I watched the sun rise over a village forty years earlier before driving off to make someone else richer.

But it is the same sun and in all essential aspects, it is the same me, despite that in the intervening years both the sun and I have been through uncountable trillions of chemical reactions and, together, covered much ground in time and space.

A different she, however, is sleeping in our room, her day not starting until much later. I am savouring this quiet stillness, anticipating the familiar embrace of the space in the writing den where shortly (I hope) as-yet-unthought words will arrive when they are ready; some will make it as if by magic on to my notebook pages.

I tell myself off for ordering this notebook from Amazon and not making the trip to the local market town to support the local, honest, ethical trade of non-oligarchs. This is the last online order, I promise both to myself and to those who are listening in my head.

Somewhere, in my awareness, or possibly just outside of it, is an understanding that all of the experiences, relationships, hardships and triumphs, wins and deeply sad losses are the patterns of my life that now fertilise the rich seedbed of my writing. Even though I don’t talk like this out loud. Not often.

I sigh, happily, taking my oversized mug, printed with its Periodic Table of Elements, upstairs to the den.

I am all the ages I have ever been.

Part 1 - Dawn

Part 3 - Noon

Part 4 - Sunset

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