end days...

Dear ones, just before I wish you all a most glorious new set of days for the year we stand on the very edge of, I would like to say this;

THANK YOU, from my heart to yours, from my hearth to yours for allowing me to feel I have made good use of the few spare hours I have in this crazy busy life. Your support, whether it arrives in a paid or free subscription, a comment or a simple tapping of the little heart at the bottom of the page have meant the world to me throughout the entire year. You are all an important and vital piece of this puzzle I create, you inspire me endlessly to continue with both your encouragement and love, and of course you are all loved in return. Consider yourselves all very tightly and warmly hugged.

I know I have only just sent you a long letter but it didn’t quite feel like an ending, Now, before the end day ends another year on this beautiful blue dot where we and every human we have ever known and loved and held lives and has lived, I feel reflective of what has passed and what is yet to come. So forgive the proximity, forgive end day ramblings which for whatever reason feel necessary. I will make them brief and wish you safe passage through to new days.

H A P P Y — N E W — Y E A R 🥂

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DECEMBER 26 — a nuthatch and a tiny gold crest sing their hearts out like groupies at a firework display of myriad light on the morning after the day of late food and hot whiskies. Their song and the light is like nature performing alchemy on our fragility… a miracle cure for all ails.

DECEMBER 27 — for the first time in too many days the night sky is clear, stars are myriad twinkling lights above me when I open my bedroom windows. An owl, perched on the barn roof, hearing the sound of movement, turns his wise eyes to me, hoots his owl hoot once, admonishment for the disturbance no doubt — with good reason, nighttime is his time after all — opens silent wings and leaves. From the woodland just behind I hear him call again, in the distance another answers him. I do not understand their language but I am glad to have heard them speaking under the stars on this night.

DECEMBER 28 — a day of melancholy; Rosie leaves on the train from Capdenac. I don’t know when she will return and my heart is heavy with love and longing for that unknown day as I watch her and the train disappear into obscurity under the tunnel.

Driving home I wonder how many more times I will feel the same way, on this same day after Christmas. I wonder at the years I have remaining in a rambling home built with labour and love on a hill in France that I love equally as much as the trees in a tiny stolen woodland next to a field with four sheep. I wonder for how much longer I will be capable of sustaining heat and repairs and Christmases when the whole family is plagued by a mischievous germ. I hope it will be many but the years pass quickly now, it feels like time is no longer a friend but a competitor in a race.

But the world is turning faster, yeah
Than it did when I was young…

Rickie Lee Jones — from Flying Cowboys.

DECEMBER 29 — returning from my dear old friend, two herons rising up from the field running parallel to the lane disappear almost immediately into the mist; two pairs of vast silent wings catch in the air like poems from prehistory, unforgettable seconds for which I have no means at all of capturing.

DECEMBER 30 — my work is often thankless, to receive acknowledgement even in the smallest of gestures from a student is a gift, appreciated always and kept safely tied in ribbon and placed in a pocket without holes. To receive a video call from not one, but two old students on the day before New Year's Eve in a group call to wish me ‘bonne fin d’année is a heartwarming gold star I will wear for the whole of the new year then frame just as a reminder that there really are occasions when I make small but important differences to young lives.

DECEMBER 31 — with my son as my fresh — icy cold — air and nature loving companion, I walk my last walk of the year around the hill; to walk with Seth is to race with a gazelle, he is now over a head taller than I am, his legs many inches longer and he has youth and curiosity and love oozing from every extremity.

I ask him which path he wants to take…

‘The hill seems to have grown smaller…’ he says.

‘As in, now that you are grown taller?’ I suggest.

‘It used to feel like the whole world’ he replies.

I turn away to hide the grief of realisation, the utter heart-splitting piercing pain. I knew this day would come. When his world would expand, that it would be he, not me turning to stand and wait, but I never imagined that he or it would grow so fast, that it would be me trotting to keep up in his world.

We watch the last sunset wink and close its eyes, I am not sure if my heart is beating rapidly because of trotting to keep up with a gazelle or pride or beauty or that we two are here, on this spot at this time smiling at the light…

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May each of your new days be blessed ones, touched by kindness and love often with forever love

PS I have added two essays I was asked to write by two amazing Substack authors <Mary L. Tabor> and Julie Gabrielli during this past year that many of you may not have seen, if you would like to read them just tap below.

Thank you, once again, for your endless love and support.

and the sun shone down

🍃 Reciprocity: the interview