HEARTS EASE
My favourite place is so clear to me; I just need to fall into my dreams and my memories to see it.
It is the view out of the huge windows in a sitting room, with a wooden floor and comfy chairs, a haze of an autumn day, a wood burning stove with the faintest hint of smoke. Out of the windows is wiry grass which merges into heather patched with that gritty earth, studded with granite. Quickly that reaches a cliff, not that high but high enough to avoid the worst of the storms. Beyond the cliffs is the grey sea with the whiteness on the skerries and the flashing ocean waves.
It is warm inside and very quiet just now. I spend a lot of time staring at the gulls, the oystercatchers and the scudding clouds. On occasion it is noisy with flung spray and the tatters of rain squalls.
It is so familiar to me that I wonder if I have been there before. When I win the lottery and am very rich indeed, that is where I hope I will go to retire and contemplate and drink coffee and whisky; there I will stroke the dog, talk to Wendy and somehow the children will be there though I have no idea where school will be or their friends from Cardross!
My favourite place is also the tawny yellow dome of a tent at Machrahanish. I can see Wendy in it; dozing in the late afternoon, her hair drifting slightly in the breeze; spiders crawling delicately on their long legs, outside on the grass. Me, sitting on a log. Ideally I would be smoking a roll up though it was years before I met Wendy that I gave up smoking. The sun is light, the clouds wispy, with just enough wind to rattle the sides of the tent in a comforting, grass smelling sort of way. Ten minutes walk away, the sea is clear and speared with sunlit shafts of light which light up the speckled whiteness of the crushed seashell sand of the sea bottom.
However it might also be my memory of when I had my own bedroom in the kitchen with patched out of screens from floor to ceiling because, however romantic tents are, snoring is much less so; necessitating extra rooms when there were none. The bed in my makeshift room is often muddy because Dash always leaps on it after his walks outside on the mudflats and the puddle strewn paths. I like to lie here and stare up out of the velux window at the autumn leaves that have landed there or at the clouds passing by and the rooks drifting in and out of view.
My favourite place? It is trite and banal to say but it is where those I love are. It is the sitting room strewn with painting material just yesterday evening when Charlotte and Wendy spread their arms wide, and just bounced, in their words and their laughter and an incredible exuberance that somehow at some point ended in sleep. It is James encroaching onto Charlottes space in the car. It is my phone and the thin metal chair in the garden on the decking where I go to get a signal to phone my mum way down in England, waiting in the sitting room that I can still see so clearly. It is my screen where sometimes I get a message from my son from Edinburgh though I cannot imagine where it is he is sleeping or talking or doing whatever it is sons you do not see, do. It is Dash the dog, who is resting his head on my feet just now in the comfy bed at the top of the house.
It is a glade in a clearing by a river somewhere near Perth where Wendy and I lay down and cuddled not far from passers by on the path further up the hill. It is the coffee pot just beginning to bubble in the morning.
After a long day, it is either Ardmore point in the sunset or from the other direction, the view down the length of the Firth with the hills of Argyll and Renfrew, the distant lights that might be Dunoon, the glimmer of the sea and the mussel beds in the moonlight. My family a few twists and turns up the road where the rooks make a racket, the bats flitter in front of my face as I get out of my car and wish for hugs and greetings while yearning for the comfort of a chair and at the same time the peace of sleep knowing they will still be there in the morning. It is knowing they will be waiting for that coffee pot or the coco pops and the glass of milk, or the sliced apples, cookies and nuts that Wendy now brings James as he contemplates school a brief half hours time from the comfort of the bed and his tablet screen.
It is also the weekend when the air is bright and full of birdsong, when we have as usual, far too late, got the flowers flowering in the garden pots: pansies, lobelia, nasturtiums and plants we do not know the names of. I do know that wild pansies are also known as Hearts Ease and I like that because when we are sitting in the late afternoon with bees and flowers and butterflies, I feel soft, I feel safe and I feel loved.
(Photo Reeds on the Clyde - September 2022)
Comments