all the years of smiles - all the years of forgotten days.

the days that made me

Dear Friends and curious passers-by, you are all welcome here on this beautiful day - our second it’s really summer summers day of June. As always I am grateful for the time you spare to share with a few minutes of mine.

Obsucura is the section of letters and essays that delves into the joy and sadnesses of memories, occasional poetry and essays not necessarily linked to wandering aimlessly on a hill. I am beginning this letter with Something I loved… because just as I sat down (on my birthday) to write this missive

Kimberly Warner

wrote and published an essay which popped up in notifications, halted my pen.

Titled In defence of Crow’s feet, filled with words of wonder like this;

…overlapping ripples filled the darkness like the surface of a pond pounded by stones and later spawned galaxies.

When I smile, fragments of these ripples extend from the corners of my eyes.

and later this;

Do crow’s feet fulfill the Universe’s dream to know itself through expansion? Ripple upon overlapping ripple of cackling stars?

I was distracted from my own as yet unwritten words as I peered in the mirror searching and hoping to see crow’s feet!

Every line is a thoughtful witchery of words - read and enjoy!

In defense of crow's feet

This morning I am sharing a few words to mark a birthday I believed - for many reasons accumulated over the years since the sad and unanticipated death of my still young parents - would never arrive. But the day did arrive and I cannot let it pass by without writing a few words to mark it as a significant achievement.

Sunday last, the day announcing sixty years of my wandering this beautiful planet arrived with a rare few rays of sunshine and the arrival of a dear friend

Gabrielle Harris

The day was unexpectedly but undeniably contented; the beautiful cause of quiet reflection - we walked under canopies of oaks along the lane, wrote Haiku in the meadow and shared a scrumptious lunch. We spoke of the furture and the past, our children, our wishes and dreams.

Later in the evening, during a solitary moment of calm on the hill whilst watching as, after another day of fierce battle with Cumulonimbus clouds, exhausted of every once of its golden energy, the sun gave its final tired wink. I watched long shadows of trees cast their last fading breath over the meadows. I was reminded of other evenings spent watching other long shadows. I thought how suddenly it can become possible to remember a single irrelevant, yet unique event, correspondingly, how, too, we forget. How there are whole chunks of months or years missing, holes in our memories where many other recollections from childhood reside. How a shadow, a scent, a colour or note of music can transport us back to those missing moments.

The years that formed us fade, we generally recall only those moments of great joy or sadness, the gentle time prior to adolescence when primarily we are led by family events and those of the community surrounding us are those we unwittingly cast aside.

I am sixty years and now, because I never seem to publish anything in time, a few days old, proud and relieved to be here reminiscing on delicate formative years… the moments that made me.

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”
― T.S. Eliot

Sunday night shadows over barley.

The innocent years…

…were day after day of contented oblivion. I was the vacant child living mostly in cloud cuckoo land - a frequent retort from my dear papa - I was elsewhere. I lacked emotional presence but physically I was everywhere. I was the silent broken winged butterfly flitting clumsily from one flower to the next lacking all the grace of its peers. I didn’t know how to do/be anything else. I had many friends, wasn’t shy or even particularly timid, I was polite - mostly - but forever lost in my own stories and (mis)understanding of life around me, the imaginary found ways to delight so much more effectively than the reality. I spent hours sitting on a secret - it wasn’t - log, on a quiet lane, day dreaming, writing poetry in my journal - of course, what daydreaming child doesn’t - wondering about birds and bees and flowers and trees and the stars and sky and how it never seemed to end and where the clouds went and the birds and butterflies at night and was that a fairy or a pixie I just felt tickle the back of my neck and are the days simply just going to end one day, disappear in a cloud of sparkling space dust like the stars do every morning - all manner of romantic and unrealistic notions and questions crowded my vacancy. I was never still for long enough to hear the answers.

How do I become still? By flowing with the stream.— Laozi (Lao Tzu)

It has taken too many of my sixty years to learn how to understand those words.

I still feel like that floaty child carrying all the same dreams and longings and I will never know the answers to all the questions because I still have to work hard at staying still and, the questions are never ending…

---

First day at school - aged five, when I found this photo I remembered watching my mother make the navy blue seersucker dress with a red bow.

I was a child of…

I was a child of The Jabberwocky and Bottersnikes and Gumbles, of The Winter Witch and Janet and John.

I was a child of dusk over stall ball pitches, of summer fetes with bunting strung across the village recreation ground. Of beer tents and biggest vegetable competitions.

I was a child of navy blue knickers and plimsoles.

I was a child of jumble sale scrambles in the village hall, clamouring hands and tangled arms over trestle tables sagged in the middle with the weight of clothes and haberdashery, unwanted residue of changing times.

I was a child of dawn hunting on ploughed fields and rabbit stew.

I was a child of coalminers strikes and Maggie Thatcher and Elvis and The Beatles, the White Album played endlessly, the words to Rocky Raccoon, an anthem I knew by heart at age six.

I was a child of homemade everything.

I was a child of invented games in derelict houses, of bottle feeding orphan sheep, of stubble scratched legs and camp building in bales of straw.

I was a child of the only family in the village whose father still drove a British racing green and black Baby Austin when all other families had shiny red, modern Ford Cortina’s.

I was a child who learned to drive on an old red Nuffield tractor with only two speeds and no brakes anyway at age eleven.

I was the child that won all the endurance races, never the 100m sprint.

I was a child of gazing out of the window because the clouds were more captivating than anything I was taught.

I was a child of ‘coca-cola in a bottle with a straw and a packet of crisps’ sitting outside in a pub garden wondering what it was like inside…

I was a child of La Petite Fleur, the original by Sydney Bechet and Acker Bilk’s Stranger on the Shore, their song.

---

These memories formed the days of my life.

They passed. I see and feel what the next day brings with no conscious thought of the fact that it is immediately filed away in the now bulging file where all my forgotten days reside never to be thought of again.

Until I hear the music or see long shadows…

What I understand of life is a minuscule dot in one galaxy of many, But, I have stayed still for just long enough to understand it’s meandering trails of highs and lows, twists and turns of which we either memorise the route or lose our way. It takes huge and fierce will to find the right road in the search for better but a mountain of both to accept ourselves for the way we are and enjoy that which is part of us and cannot be changed.

“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.”
― Haruki Murakami

Remember every day you can, see how fast and fluidly one will ignite another…

With love

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Substack

if you subscribe or upgrade to a paid subscription during my sixtieth year. The fee is less than a cup of posh frothy coffee and will last for as long as you are here