Seize The Breeze

This is the dawning of days filled with flowers.  Flowers and leaf laden trees, pollen filled, attracting the bees.  This is the release of summer, the emergence of sunshine, the showers, the growth, the birds, starlings swirling in the air, making their arrival known.  The swans have mated, the signets looking upon the big wide pond, from their straw worn nest.      

I lie in bed, only just awoken, and see the clouds float by my window.  I sleep with the curtains open.  I like to see the stars and the clouds and the trees reaching up to the clear skies.  This morning the trees wave in the breeze.  It’s gentle, this breeze, like my awakening.  Introduced to the day by bird song, as two little sparrows sit on the telegraph wire outside the window.   

As I consider my night for a moment, I allow the sleep to slip from my body.   If you are unaware of your night’s sleep, you’ve slept well.  If it was dreamless, you were sound.  I did have a dream.  My old boss was in it.  She was passing me over for promotion.  Dreams are crazy.  Where do they come from?

The visions too, that keep popping into my head from time to time, no apparent order to them, why do they just drop in uninvited?  The vision I see this morning flits behind my eyes again as it has so often in the last two months.  I see my mum, gently sleeping in bed, her lips blue.    

I get up and try not to dwell in this sensation.  I look instead outside my window.  The skies are cloud filled, but white clouds, not ominous rain filled patches as forecast.  The light of the sun is rising in the east.  My bed faces east.  I like the east.  The way the morning sun ascends, slowly, raising its hands in a refreshing stretch, makes me unroll.  Time now for me to get up.  I know I have to get up, I cannot give in to aimlessness.  I breakfast while reading my book about life and war and love and relationships, and all the while my mind is whirring.            

There’s a pile of freshly laundered clothes on the chair by me, and I pick them up, take them upstairs.  I put them on the drawers.  As I turn something comes over me, catches me unawares.  I don’t know why or what causes it, this feeling, but it’s as strong and as cold as the arctic seas, touching me only momentarily.  This notion carries words, words that only I can hear.  The words translate into a story of instability.  My mum’s passing, the narrative which has brought with it my insecurity.

Even though we know this time will come, there is a part of every child which thinks that their parents will be with them forever.  A mother is the first person a newborn child sees at birth, the first human touch, a childhood filled with unconditional love.  Dependant, the chick in the nest, fed and watered and taught to fly, the mother flying by their young’s side, protective always.          

I wobble forward just the tiniest of shades, grip the drawers and then I gasp.  It comes to me, this revelation that is no surprise, but still, it stuns me in its realisation.  My mum, who has been with me for sixty-four years, is gone.  Taking with her the practical stability that forever supported me.  You become accustomed to it, you take it for granted and it’s only when it’s taken from you that you notice and it shakes you.

It doesn’t happen right away.  No, this understanding is there, but it lies dormant, allowing other thoughts to cascade and fill your head, and it waits its time.  It wants to be noticed, so it hits you suddenly, out of the blue, making you stumble and cry out for the return of that stability.

The apron strings may have been untied in young adulthood, but they still hang loose, they are there even if they do not bind you close, but when they are removed permanently, when your mother is taken from you, there is a jolt to your foundations.  A fissure, a crack, an open sore.

I make for the pond, and the swans, who guard their young, where magpies snigger and hop, where sheep stray, where ferns sprout higher and higher, where the trees stand tall, day in, day out, and the water ripples and I sit, I seize the breeze and let the good memories flow.