And now there are four............

Here is the youngest of them,

some time ago, demonstrating one of her first smiles. She's a bit older now and she has more hair and lots more coordination and a good amount of chatty babble, but there's something special about this early smile. Surprise and joy! How wonderful to be so new, so fresh, so delighted by what you see for the first time.

We still haven't met, little M and I. She and her three year old brother live in Austria, amid mountains and clean alpine air and lots of snow. When the snow melts and the Alpine flowers start to emerge I'm hoping to visit and meet my fourth grandchild, second grand-daughter. Each son's family has a boy and a girl, and their ages now range from ten years to four months.

This is the loveliest part of my ageing life, to know that the four of them are there, healthy and loved in their different locations.

Not Really My Friend.

 

The robin, or perhaps two robins are flitting around with so much stuff in their beaks that they can barely see where they are going. They are scarifying my near-by lawn, possibly saving me from the trouble of doing so, ripping at fragments of  dried grass and moss. They want to go into the thick hedge of ivy, but I am sitting too near it. 

I am sitting on the new stone patio area, enjoying the warm sun of this Easter Bank Holiday, making a slow recovery from the brain-fog and other discomforts of Covid.  I am appreciating the new area of the garden, mildly speculating about its development, listening to the constant humming of insects (or maybe it's still the Covid tinnitus). Anyway, the robins want me out of it.

This is their chosen place. They need to fly from the lawn to the back of the garden chair, and then, after looking all round, make a swift hop into the ivy with their load of building materials, but now I'm sitting on the chair they have appropriated as a landing stage. How infuriating is that?

It is infuriating enough to make at least one of them dive so close to my head that I flinch. Prior to this they have shouted at me from some distance, then hopped along the garden table to where my arm is resting in order to shout at me in close-up. One of them has come perilously close to my hand, its bright little eyes gleaming, its head tilting speculatively from side to side. Is any portion of my hand edible? Does it contain food or building material? Can it be shifted by sheer robin will-power? I remain immobile. I'm comfortable in the sunny warmth, and I'm interested to see just how far they will go to get rid of me.

People often say they have these incredibly friendly robins in their gardens. Robins who perch on the handles of their tools, who follow them around the garden, singing to them, just wanting company. Little friends. Charming robins of the sort that feature on Christmas cards, bearing good wishes.

The robins in my garden also zoom in as soon as I go out, not to be friends, but to see what I can unearth for them. I am a useful provider, as the wild boar used to be in an Anglo-Saxon forest, which is probably where the robins learned to follow creatures who could dig up grubs. Any minute now they will make me go and scarify the lawn for them, and possibly put the scarifications near to where I know they are building their nest.

I admire them for their determination, tenacity and strength in protecting what they most firmly believe to be their territory with all its resources. Their strength is such that they will kill one another if necessary, and their tenacity enables them to drive away a great lumbering giant who is seriously interrupting a vital bit of their survival process.

The lumbering giant goes back to the house to make a cup of coffee.

 Friends we are not - but I do understand.

What Could be Better?

 
 

Three grandchildren, playing together in the sunshine. What could be better?  This is only their second meeting, their first being nearly a year ago because the youngest lives in Austria, but now they begin really to know each other and to communicate.

Travel becomes possible, even if something of a challenge with an active two year-old and all his equipment. My elder son passed his pre-flight CPR test in Austria and got to England for a weekend with his brother's family. The sun shone, toys were shared, gifts were given, everyone was happy and well. What could be better?

After that my elder son and his son travelled by train to stay with me for a few days. The sun was still shining. Then next morning my son felt a bit unwell and used a lateral flow test. To his considerable surprise it was positive. 

Never mind! I had a big freezer full of food, we had lots of toys and books and there was a garden to explore, birds to feed, lots of interesting things to do at home.

Later that day small grandson became unhappy, restless, clingy and obviously infected too. Still never mind, We could all be comfortable here. I asked a kind neighbour to buy us some extra large paper tissues though. Extra paracetamol too, because by the next day I was also producing two red lines.

Never mind, not even now! We were here, together in the sunshine. We had a week more than any of us thought possible, still in the sunshine, in the garden, developing skills on a plastic motorbike (well, one of us was) digging in the sand box, doing a bit of biscuit-making (two of us), sampling the results and giving the remainder to the birds. There were bumble bees and ants to study. There was even frogspawn in the pond.

For a two year-old unlimited time and attention from caring adults is wonderful, as is unlimited time to look out of a window, to study a leaf or an insect, to run about freely in a safe space. It's extremely valuable for an 82 year old granny to do it as well - except for the running about bit.

What could be better for all of us than this priceless time? And we were boosting our immunity as well.

Carry on Learning

Here I am, nine years old, about to fail in learning to swim; a failure which has remained with me for the next 73 years, and one that I can at last recognise as a failure to learn to trust. This photograph was taken in the tidal swimming pool at Lynmouth, North Devon. Two years later Lynmouth was devastated by flooding. I remember my distress when the news finally reached us, realising for the first time how precarious the whole business of life could be.

 I had slight memories of War, of spending time in an air-raid shelter, but in a time before television I  knew only what I had been allowed to hear on radio, or via the illicit reading of a newspaper. I was protected from  knowing the realities. There was no personal involvement, but the destruction of a pretty village where I had spent a holiday was an awakening that changed my childhood. A river had done that. A river that I had walked along, paddled in, watched fish and fishermen beside. River water,  amplified into raging torrents by prolonged rainfall, had burst open stone cottages, torn bridges apart, flung great rocks and whole trees into houses and caused the deaths of more than 30 people, some of whom were never found. Yet this was a natural disaster, quite different from my limited experience of war, and totally unlike what we face today. More than enough to make me feel that I could never trust moving water again though.

My dislike of and failure to achieve any sort of competence in swimming remains, despite several intensive swimming courses and an amount of reassurance that I can actually swim. Perhaps I can, but if I can I can't breathe at the same time which puts me at a disadvantage, I suppose. My older grandchildren, now nine and five years old, are good or better than good swimmers, and now the two year-old can do it as well. I'd really like another try at swimming with a two year-old and I should make myself have another go. But I am not at all confident.

The learning that is so infinitely more important is learning to trust, not just water, but life itself. It seems so vital at these moments of  man-made turmoil, conflict and corruption that we can somehow hang on to a trust that the world is full of good and honourable people; that other drivers on the road will be careful, that people who say they will deliver your groceries will do so, that the vast unknown population is basically well-intentioned. Even more goodness comes from people who drive public transport, doctors who prescribe, surgeons who cut and remove bits, pilots and air crew who take you thousands of miles in a metal tube. You don't know them, yet you put your life into their hands You have to trust them. You have to trust the contents of boxes and bottles in the shops, that they contain what it says on the outside, even to the amount of calories (well, do you really?).  You have to trust the people who teach your children and grand-children, who feed your cat when you're away, who stop their vehicle at a road crossing when the signal tells them to. Then there people who are vital in your life, family, friends, neighbours, colleagues without whom life would be meaningless and empty. Too many people to number, all of then good, kind, caring and essential. We must never let the turmoil of an often regrettably reactive life devalue them or diminish their importance.

We are all enclosed in a great bubble of trust and goodness, and we need it as much as air itself.

Living and swimming are acts of trust.

Long-Buried Treasure.

I have not been idle during  the long, Covid-laden break from blogging, and neither has Jenny Woolf whose posting today on her lovely blog has inspired me to reveal some of my own recent preoccupations and diversions.

For me, the paper-sorting seems endless. My husband died many years ago, and still I have boxes of his writing, collections of relevant cuttings, letters, souvenirs, photographs and other relics of a life lived with books and documents. Then, just when I thought I had seen almost all of his archive, a bundle of records of family life appeared from within a fat folder of theological papers: home-made cards, petitions, letters of thanks and requests, postcards and drawings by our sons from the age when they could first clutch a crayon. I must have seen most of them at some time, but I didn't know that he had kept them.

This is something I wrote and that he pinched and hid among the theology, probably thinking that I wouldn't bother to keep it among the confused welter that was my desk in those days of family chaos. This special bit of paper brought sunshine into my day this morning.

 I recorded verbatim a bit of a Sunday morning in church with sons aged three and six. I never knew that he thought it was worth keeping. I hope we managed to have a laugh about it at the time.

In church.

*=repeated at least three times in crescendo.

E: (aged 3) There's Mrs. Evans. *Hello, Mrs.Evans.

H: (aged 6) Why doesn't Mr. Evans come to church?

Mother: (age not specified) I'll tell you later.

H: Why?

Mother: Because it's a long story.

H: Why?

M: Shhh.

E: Why? What you talking about? Eh? What you and you talking about?

Both parents: Shhhhh!

Both boys read books. E comments loudly throughout.

E:* Let's sing now!

M: Shhhhh. No! Not yet.

E: Yes! Let's have a sing now!. (Sings loudly.)

Both parents, unison: Shhhhhh.

People in pews behind and in front; "Shhhhhh!

H: Mummy. Mummy. I have to know something.

M: Just wait a bit. Please!

H: Just tell me if there are people buried under this floor.

E: Eh? What? Where people under the floor?

H: And I need to know why aren't there any gravy-stones outside this church?

M: Shhhh, just wait until we get outside.

H: It's important. It's in my head and I'm thinking about it now.

M: Probably because it hasn't been consecrated as burial ground. Wait and ask Father A. afterwards.

E:* What? What you talking about? What under the floor?

H: Well, where do people get buried then?

M: Ask Father A. afterwards. Try to listen now.

E slides to floor: What under floor? Nothing under floor?

H: slides to floor: Let's looks for gravy-stones, E!

Both parents, unison: GET UP!

Boys restored to pew after relevant scuffling, threats and protests.

H: Why doesn't Mr. Evans have to come to church?

E:* What?

Very Important Places.

This is the place where I last sat with a dear friend. Quite recently. Now it will be enshrined in memory.

Many others will sit here, and we will have afternoon tea, as we did then. Tiered cake-stand in fine bone china, patterned most appropriately with forget-me-not flowers. Home-made cakes and scones, of course. Cucumber sandwiches, of course, and there will be honey still for tea, but I doubt if anyone else will make a special request for sticky jam sandwiches. I doubt if anyone else could face death with such bravery, compassion and thought for others. Forget-me-not.

This is the place where people can walk into a new section of garden, cool, quiet, fern-filled. Soon there will be a special table for outdoor meals (as well as for me to do a bit of potting up). Children will need to watch out for frogs and possibly trolls under the bridge. But the trolls will have to be small, and certainly not of the breed found on the internet. The lower support rail of the bridge is formed from the adventurous and successful growing of a giant Echium last year in my front garden. I was so proud of it. It reached my bedroom window with its great spire of bee-filled blue flowers. It eventually blew down in a gale, and the stem was like a tree-trunk. I couldn't bear to throw it away. So it was incorporated into the bridge.

The small ginger curly head crossing the bridge is not a grandchild, but a very charming poodle visitor who has just been on holiday here and approves of the garden.

                                                                               

This is the place where my husband created a door many years ago. The door is  still there, but the summerhouse that surrounded it has gone. It's a suitably eccentric door with glass panels, one of them painted by our son. The door opens on to a totally overgrown and inaccessible railway embankment, but my husband fixed a 'Private' notice on the outside just in case (or perhaps because he had it and needed to fix it somewhere). It's all still there.

I found it difficult to lose the hard work my husband put into creating the summerhouse. But it had to go. The door didn't.

 Every garden needs a door into another secret garden.

This is the place for a different sort of door - a fairy door of course, with solar-powered lighting and a staircase inside the opening door. It's positioned so that it may be checked at night from the bedroom where the fairy-watchers sleep. It has been built into the dry-stone walling by the team of stone-masons who did the garden reconstruction work recently, as was the very rustic bridge, created from special timbers. They seemed to quite like it, but they could just have been humouring me.

The fairy-watchers haven't found it yet. I hope they haven't already out-grown it. 

The garden will grow, new memories will be created.

But old ones will be treasured, as will the people who created them.

Special thanks to my bridesmaid of some decades ago, Hellen, who took the photos when I wasn't looking.

All Changing.

 

Still in the middle of change, but last week great progress was made in this garden. This is the result of my long time of isolation which resulted in lots of thinking time and a realisation of what is really important for my hopefully remaining years. I have realised how much I hope to be able to remain here.

 In my house which is large for one person, but not large enough if all the family should want to be here together.  

In my garden which is complex and needs a lot of maintenance, but which is a wonderful place for friends and family, especially smaller ones.

 In my neighbourhood, which contains many friends and which is ideally located for good local shops and local rail and road transport, even though I have not used any form of public transport since the pandemic started.

Before Covid struck I had regular help with both house and garden, but since then I had to manage without anyone entering the house, and now I find that I'm able to continue alone.

The garden needs a lot of attention, so it seemed to be time to simplify things. The greatest need was for repair of the crumbling walls, built by my husband from reclaimed stone.  Another need was regrettable but necessary; the demolition and removal of a summerhouse, also created from reclaimed materials and now in a sorry state fourteen years after his death.

So last week it all began with a firm called Colwall Stone who came to do not only the stonework but also some other tough jobs; removing old fencing and replacing with something different, as well as demolishing and removing the summerhouse, replacing it with a stone patio.

This firm does beautiful precise work with stone, but here they have been asked also to create a rustic bridge suitable for Hobbits, to incorporate a fairy door into a dry-stone wall, to make a stepping-stone path from the bridge to the new patio. And to be completely fair, they not only picked up my ideas but they ran with them, suggesting and finding the rustic materials for the bridge, and also finding a stone arrow to point to where the new family-and-friends dining table will be (so that none of the grandchildren will get lost in the bamboo jungle). They have also been asked (not to say nagged) about respecting some of the planting, and one team member is learning rather more than he wants to know about alpines. I hope the regular deliveries of tea, coffee, biscuits and occasional cake help. It's small return for all the cheerful consideration and extra care that is given.

There's more work to go, but I am so encouraged by the results so far that I can look forward to all the planting work to be done as my part. I'm so thankful that I had the time to sort out what I actually needed to do, and that I've found a team who can do it, no matter how eccentric it may seem. All it needs now is family and friends to come and enjoy it.