Three score

My birthday today. A big one. This last week I've been like a child awaiting Christmas.

Sixty. Three score years. Ten more to go before my time's up if tradition is anything to go by. The family genes hint that I may be around a bit longer than that but the reality that individual existence is finite and that it will vanish, dissolve into something with a different shape and form or without shape and form, ideally lends a heightened awareness and a freedom to each day. A lightening up. Which is as it should be. Throw what's left of one's allotted span into the air and see what shape it takes when it hits the ground.

Inventory:

• The blessed liberation from the hormonal merry go round, and a consequent level of calm and equilibrium (some of the time) .
• I can finally stop trying to get it right. If I haven't by now I never will and it doesn't matter. It being life.
  
• There are still yearnings: to belong, love in the widest sense and an end to loneliness. But you start where you are with what you have.
• Good health and fitness - the right rotator cuff excepted - are real, unexpected gifts. My body and I are finally on amicable terms. Weight has normalised. Clothes fit. I had huge food issues once so this is a big deal.
• Family: my sister, my cousin. Meeting up with the former in a few hours time.
  
• Friendships continue and a couple of new ones are forged. Others fall apart or fade away.
• Nearly bankrupt we may be but as of today the state throws a small monthly pension in my direction. Not enough to live on by itself, I'll need to work for a good while yet, but I'm thankful to have it. Plus free prescriptions for any medicine I might require and - best of all - free bus travel all over England. The downside: the identity photo on the bus pass is truly depressing.
  
• And there's more. As an OAP I can sign up for U3A, show up for the £3 afternoon Silver Screenings at the local cinema, get ten per cent off paintbrushes and spanners on Wednesdays at B&Q ...
• Engaged and humorous colleagues who do a great job in the community. And who threw a surprise lunchtime birthday bash on Friday.
  
• The cat. Of course. He's the feline equivalent of 86.
  

There are skills to develop. Plants to discover. A blog to write. Books to read. Seasons to greet. Footpaths to walk.

****

The sky pale blue, translucent after weeks of rain. The warmest day of the year so far according to the BBC. When I let the cat out just now the air was clear and heady, like a fine cool wine. Earth and grass damp. Breathe deeply.

Prana. Life force. The one constant

None of it matters.
All of it matters, every second and atom.

I wouldn't be twenty again for the world.

Bedtime

Prompted by Dale's recent post:


I think of my father particularly at this time of the year. He died in April over a decade ago, during the bluebell season.

****

I was eleven years old and heading towards a difficult adolescence, my sister, L, around one year. At her bedtime and because she insisted, my father - in his late forties by now - would carry her around the living room, moving from picture to picture, object to object, stopping briefly at each.

Goodnight ships (in front of a picture) ... goodnight other ships ... goodnight table ... goodnight trees ... goodnight window.

During the ritual my sister clutched her favourite stuffed toy, a koala bear. The pronounciation defeated her. The rest of the family followed her lead and called it Kayola.

****

He was at his best with babies and very small children: something tense and taut unwound and his defences lowered a fraction to display a quiet tenderness. He would have doted on grandchildren almost certainly, but neither L nor I were cut from a conventional nor a maternal cloth.


****

Our relationship feels easier at this distance. I struggled. So did he. The difficulties - there were a lot - matter less, his integrity and humour matter more.

Green corn

On this misty, rainy morning we climbed a hill ...

and walked through the bluebell woods ...



... and along a leyline and passed a church and two dogs and their owners and marvelled at the bluebells and the cornflowers and the pink campions and the rape (ugh, hate that word but the fields are shockingly, wonderfully yellow) and the red soil. And against the red soil the green, young green wheat, green woodlands. In the field, larks rose around us, singing.





A verse from the John Masefield hymn came to mind

Lo, all my heart's field red and torn
and thou wilt bring the young green corn
the young green corn divinely springing
the young green corn for ever singing.






Echoes of long ago school assemblies. Horrible, I hated my schooldays but on this particular morning the angst has faded and I'm not going to quibble about the religious theme. Masefield, the avid reader, seafarer and eventual Poet Laureate, was a local lad: he knew about red soil. And it is a beautiful poem ....

... the laughter of holy white birds flying after

On this hill, the parliamentarian armies laid siege to our royalist city in the valley below over four centuries ago. The men were so hungry they ate the cider apples in the orchards and the potatoes and robbed the farmhouses of bread and towards the end in extremis resorted to eating acorns. Difficult to imagine today in all this greenery and lushness. Indeed, the land is almost too perfectly cared for, too well manicured: wild flowers flourish along the lanes, no pesticides on these verges, no litter that I could see. A mystery solved when the landowner's name is spotted on a notice. Enough to convert one into a present-day royalist.



The hardest part of the walk was the last part, climbing the hill for the second time. A steep, hard pull. Near the summit we rested on a log on the edge of the wood in silence for five minutes or so. The field in front of us rose steeply, the line of the horizon curved like a giant's back recumbent against the sky. Raindrops on leaves. The moist smell of earth. The harsh call of a pheasant. The distant murmur of traffic, faint but just discernible. I hadn't wanted to come out this morning, had something on my mind, hadn't wanted to see anyone. Yet growing older, I have learned from experience that I don't always know what's good for me and consequently can be persuaded. By people I trust, by an uncertain yet stubborn faith in the apparently random flow of life.




"Shall we go?" my companion asks. We head for the car. Next stop, the house and a late lunch.

...

The shoulder still stiffens when I spend too long here at the computer. I overdid it on Friday and it took thirty six hours for the pain to subside. Thank god that nothing is obligatory in the blogosphere. Short posts, long posts. Whatever works. Right now, photographic posts seem to fit the bill. I love taking photographs and it's easier on the body than writing.