Tag Archives: family

This is not goodbye – but I am updating my bucket list

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If 2015 was a dramatic encounter with the past, this year began with the ‘innocent’ mark on my leg being diagnosed as a melanoma, that is, a nasty form of skin cancer which is potentially life-threatening. Executive summary is that I had it cut out and my lymph system checked and all is clear, the best possible news and I am mighty relieved and happy about this.

The future? Without going into boring details, the consensus is it ‘probably’ will not recur, I will be scanned and checked regularly, no guarantees, but when did life ever come with guarantees?

We know we will die without, in my opinion, quite believing it; we sleep walk through life until moments like this jolt us awake. The fact of death does not concern me whereas the process does and I am a strong supporter of the ‘dying with dignity’ movement. Anyway, enough maudlin and macabre pondering!

I apologise for being silent on this blog for the last 3 or 4 months, simply too much drama swirling here while ‘stuff’ from the past got dealt with and 2016 gets reorganised.

Now, my bucket list. So far, it is remarkably short! I have been lucky [yes, we make our own luck] to have travelled widely, to have had a variety of jobs which I loved and to have ‘ticked off’ many amazing experiences. Communing with the mountain gorillas in Rwanda, visiting the Mogoa Caves [Caves of the thousand Buddhas] on the old Silk Road, the Potala Palace in Lhasa, hiking the Compostella in Spain and the Via Podiensis across France and so many more life-affirming encounters with people and places.

And let’s not forget incredible family and friends – and a few buckets of manure slap in the face along the path of life. Yes, I have thrown my own buckets of shit and am not proud of that.

What have I come up with to date for my bucket list?

  • Petra
  • Northern Lights
  • Kakadu and Arnhem Land
  • Antarctica
  • Esfahan

Piece of cake. Oh and I have submitted my novel ms to three publishers and started revising the sequel, the melanoma scare focused my mind and stopped my endless tinkering with what I had written.

So, it’s all good and life is good. Nothing like a shock to wake us up, we all need it sometimes.

 

 

When pebbles become avalanches and relationships end

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Friends of mine have just split up with no chance of reconciliation and I have conflicting emotions. Part of me is shocked that the ending came abruptly and with such finality and a smaller part of me says ‘that was always going to happen, I saw it coming’.
More accurately, I should say that I was surprised and then began to think about the no-longer-a-couple and understood that I had registered the signs, grown accustomed to them and assumed they would continue together neither truly happy nor miserable, fearful of being alone.
When did the process begin? At what point was the end of the relationship unavoidable and needing only one final pebble – an unkind word, a look, an impatient sigh or a miniscule act of bad faith – to trigger the landslide of recrimination and the decision from which there is no going back?
Those tiny pebbles of hurt or neglect, unconscious perhaps at first and later consciously, maybe deliberately hurtful, uncaring at least, which unearth other pebbles and soon there is a tumble, small and then bigger and finally an avalanche and then silence when the words are over and there is nothing left to be said.
Not always of course, not every day. Rather an accumulation of grit like an axle on a baggage-laden cart rolling along dusty roads day after day in good times and bad and it is not noticeable and anyway it does not matter or we believe it can be rectified ‘later’ [fateful, lazy word] when we have more time or are under less pressure or the kids are grown up or a myriad of other reasons until later is replaced by ‘too late’.
Looking back we puzzle when the pebble became an avalanche and we let it happen.
And yet –
And yet. Is the feeling of the inevitability of the end itself merely an excuse for our self-absorption in the trivia of the narcissistic culture in which we live, a world obsessed with individual rights [happiness, freedom, success, self-expression].

And what is happening in our little Swedish village?

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Anika is walking in long summer twilight, pacing out to the old ruined church and back through the village to the cluster of houses high in the fields and farms to the east of Ovraby. She sends startled hares running and catches a glimpse of a deer and her young.
She ponders possibilities, future scenarios of this woman from a foreign land living in this small community: never quite belonging because she is a foreigner and yet almost accepted since she married a Swede and speaks Swedish fluently. She is inside and outside, belonging and not belonging and feeling this is a metaphor for her life.
Will she become the local eccentric living alone, not perhaps with a cat, but still a figure of curiosity and sorrow?
Will she stay the tragic figure who lost her husband and chose never to love again? Who chose to remain childless and alone?
Will she stay on the track which presently runs her life and be the successful career woman travelling to and fro, retaining her house in Ovraby though rarely seen and become a figure of envy and respect amongst the village folk?
Doe she have the courage to roll the dice with Tom, that lost soul from the other side of the world who still speaks with the spirit of his dead wife, for Heaven’s sake?

In a small Swedish village where strange things may happen

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I am in Ovraby in Southern Sweden for mid summer in the very village where our heroine Anika lives in the dream house she built with her beloved Anders before tragedy struck.
That tragedy and the aftermath has driven her to the Camino where, you will recall, she has recently met Tom from Australia and where both are trying to come to terms with the past and to believe in a now and a future.
We are in a typical small village, maybe thirty houses with no shops or other services or facilities and where neatness and control and good appearance may hide many a secret. I am not staying in Anika’s house, but the one I have chosen for her is not so far away and fits perfectly with what I have in mind for her.
Mid summer is over, the usual mix of cloud, scudding rain and lovely sunshine plus the maypole at the old mill and the ebb and flow of friends and strangers coming together for a day and a night.
Tom has returned to Australia and they have agreed to meet again in one year.
Will it happen?

Afternoon tea with dragons

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We all love dragons, right? One day per week I mind my granddaughter after school until mummy and daddy and little brother get home. The first hour or more is spent filling the bottomless pit of this slender 5 year old with a variety of food, remembering that last week’s favourite food now is ‘yuk’, that ‘mummy and daddy say it is okay to have biscuits’ though both of us know this is untrue and Emma cannot keep a straight face as she says it. ‘Good try’ I say and she laughs and we negotiate our way through until she says ‘will you play with me farfar?’ This being Swedish for grandfather and a story for another day. We play ‘make believe’, both of us filling in the story line and adding costumes as we go; a blanket becomes a magic cloak, a piece of string a golden binding and so on: games and stories played countless times by countless children. And I have been promoted over the last three years. First I was typecast as a ‘scary monster’, with instructions not to be ‘too scary’, then a bad dragon who invariably and magically became good and married the princess [no prizes for guessing who this is]. Lately I have become the ‘good dragon with magical powers’ and this is a very fine role indeed. The only drawback to being a dragon is that when three year old William comes home, I must be killed for he is the fearless knight and dragon slayer. Such is life. Or not, as the case may be. Now the tram has stopped and so must I.