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Congratulations to the bride and groom, may you be happy together forever. Here is the small stone I wrote for the couple:
Purple hearts of the redbud tree weep raindrops of happiness onto white roses who hold their petals as if for the bride's bouquet.
As I look out my window today in Portland, Oregon the weather has changed once again back to rain for a couple of days. My Eastern Redbud sits in front of my door, its beautiful purple heart-shaped leaves bright against a background of many shades of green. Under it is a rose bush with stark white roses. Today, the purple leaves are drip drip dripping with rain, and drops are glistening all along the branches as well. Yesterday the sun was shining through the leaves, making them deep red -- another gorgeous sight, today it is rain and I choose to see the drops as tears of happiness for the bride. They do seem happy and have gathered so many people to celebrate with them, asked people to write these small stones for their wedding. To share in their joy. Brilliant! Ask for what we want, share our joy. These are concepts to be taken up and employed in all our lives, people. Better than wedding cake!
TO A GRANDDAUGHTER
With tight fists and mewing cry
You demand attention
With apricot down on cushion cheeks
And eyes like smoky Lapis Lazuli
You demand attention
With soft burps and semi permanent hiccups
And a look that seems as old as granite
You hold us as we hold you
and we’re together forever.
The City Creats New Landscapes After Dark
Three blushing lilies in a red glass vase fill the air with pink scent.
Marble arms slicing through water, the sound of Ritchie Valens bouncing off the swimming pool walls, ten bodies following orders, arching and splashing and making clumsy unlikely movements to order. And afterwards feeling virtuous, as though we'd been to church or watched a re-run of The Waltons...
In a hospital waiting room where the wait is weighed in hours, I pick up a paperback and smell the pepper of old ink on its lightly braised pages. It's Maigret's first case M.Gallet decede translated to Stonewalled in this green Penguin printed the year I was learning to read.
Patients are complaining to each other, chairs grind out a protest on the linoleum, but here, in these tired pages, It's a hot summer in 1931 and there is a bullet in a body in the Hotel de la Loire.
I am twenty miles from Paris. I am walking the mile long boulevard of dust with the Chief Inspector. He is sweating. So I am. We are both overweight.
The nurse calls my name.
A last minute meeting at home. Ok so I hadn't found the time to hoover. I'm a working woman and my lounge sometimes turns into my office. Ok so I hadn't managed to shift all the clean washing from downstairs to upstairs. I thought about it at 2pm but an urgent email got in the way. And a deadline. And another deadline.
Good meeting. Great meeting with a woman I had never met before. A meeting of minds. As I said goodbye, mentally timetabling all the things we'd agree, I noticed the pile of clean clothes on the chair that would have been in her direct eye line. And that's when I saw the pair of knickers sitting on top.
Oh God
Oh God
Oh God
A mirror from last summer
still reflecting in our August memories
A perfect moment with my youngest son in a quiet flat. In another room Classic FM is playing, but in this one all we can hear is hiccups as his week old daughter gazes into his eyes and smiles. We both know it is wind: neither of us believes it.
Taking a short cut through a small cemetery, where it always seems to be autumn, I noticed for the first time a weathered headstone to a grandfather called Fred Friend. The alliteration, a furry blur on the tongue, encourages smiling and I think I would have liked this man whose family knew that he wouldn't have wanted the formality of Frederick.
Head full of history and the danger of adverbs
Arms full off registers and hand outs
A shy smile from a new student who
is not certain she's in the right place.
A lazy grin from a two semester old timer who
knows he is.
It's the start of a new term
Woke up with a head full of things to do: a house to clean and a wash to be put on; emails to send and an accountant to ring; a last look at a class handout. Does it do the job?
And then I remember that I've left a small stone unwritten. And I knew what I was going to write about too.
I had made notes in my very beautiful William Morris notebook about city streets at night when the puddles on the pavement dance with the lights from the queues of cars driving out of town. I was going to write about the darkness hiding last summer's fly blown dirt clinging to the windows of the pub at the corner and the feeble wreath of Christmas lights that still straddle the windows. And I was going to find a metaphor to somehow convey how I felt looking through the window and seeing that, although all the lights were on and there was an empty glass on the bar, no one was inside and it looked as though no one was coming...
And it would have been good too. If I had found that metaphor and if I had remembered to write it down.
Whenever I cook roast potatoes and I do often, two or three times a month, I think of my mother's Sunday dinners...lamb a soft lavender grey with fat the colour of cream, the rich nearly-burnt brown of the beef joint and the pallid chicken, served up in chunky slices with a watery gravy that tasted of disappointment. But it is my mother's potatoes that I remember most vividly. They really should have been crisper: they failed every acceptable culinary standard, but oh, how they tasted. Cooked in fat from roasting the Sunday's joint, under my mother's gaze the par boiled King Edward's would turn a gentle butterscotch in an oven that wasn't quite hot enough. She would turn them out and shrug: not much good again while I would try to steal a golden mouthful when she wasn't looking.
Just met for the first time the word mizzle, Cornish for what we Irish call soft rain. Its not falling from the sky rain so much as floating water, mixing with the air to leave seeds of silver in hair and on the gentle down of wool jumpers. Its soft, seditious rain soaking layers of clothes without the owner noticing until they are wet through...
The sea mists have melted away
leaving
a grey day
you can see through
I'm late creating this small stone...for reasons that will become clear...
This evening at 7.26 a bonnie little girl was born with black hair and midnight eyes: Aylah. Our granddaughter.
Random Thoughts
A word picked at random from a book picked at random – third shelf from the bottom, fifth book from the left, flip to page 101 and first noun or adjective (no adverbs)
The Book
I pick up Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography and it's a pleasure to hold it again. I haven’t touched these pages in a couple of years.
The word
Centuries
It's a good word to spring from a history book, stretching back to the centuria, the Roman soldiers who marched across the world. But the group of 100 weren’t all military men, the Romans took their administrators with them, knowing that control needs more than the point of a sword.
They also took something else. I remember a half heard radio programme explaining the importance of foot care to a Roman soldier. It’s an uncomfortable truth but the centuria wore socks.
With sandals.
The tree is the ghost of a forest,
shape-shifting with the seasons.
It's a ship’s mast planted in the playground,
sailing across a tarmac sea.
A muffled drum beats a slow and steady rhythm and I think I recognise the tune. If it wasn’t behind my right eye, I might even be able to dance to it.
Rich russet tiles, still wearing the touch of the men of who made them, warming a January evening.
Making soup from the forgotten: the onions roll forward, pushing and shoving, among them a generous womanly onion, brazen in burgundy, a white one in sleek silver, slippery as lycra, a snapping young one, crisp in sheer lingerie; then the carrots, lots of carrots, a legion of carrots, all of them too long on active service, growing old and whiskery at the bottom of the fridge. The tomatoes follow, rich and sweet and showing off and, finally, a tiny touch of chili sneaks in, a spy, an undercover agent, a depth charge.
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She must be beautiful.
Yep that about sums it up
Aww! sweet you must be love her so much!