Happy New Year Brave World
REd walls, christmas lights, a wooden stable in the window with a little white cloth draped over for snow. I remember the sense of wonder I felt at the shoebox my mother transformed into a stable and cotton wool since then took on the possibility of magic. I'm back in her house - I know festivities have almost past but this bloody cold bug hasn't. I didn't know chests could rattle like a bag of stones shaken in an intruder's face. Though there is the family feeling and the Christmas feeling I hold onto still being here and not four hundred miles north. Almost fifty years old and still needing tae be a wee lassie sometimes. Like Christmas time. And they are moving - my mother's husband contracted (don't know if that's the right word in this context) dementia (after a car crash) and so they are off to a retirement village. Nice place. Community. Hot tub even. Still, here I am, taking things off the wall. Wandering through rooms and remembering. Take anything you want, my mother says. It is like being in a huge shop where everything is free!
Often I see 'stuff' as just that, like a burden. But here, coughing and sniffing and slowing down, packing boxes, I see it isn't that at all. All these pictures, works of art, photos, trinkets, ornaments, souvenirs froms friends and countries make up a home with warmth and character.
And here I am staring at my dear Grandmother looking beautiful in sepia tones at about the age of nineteen when she was in service. It must have been her day off. And she's dressed for the occasion and holding a scroll in her hand which the photographer saw fit. Above this girl is the same woman perhaps seventy years later smiling and looking also beautiful. Beside that there is one more photo of my grandmother, with a cloch hat pulled down and she is walking with my grandfather. He is dapper with a bowler hat on and in the picture he is pulling at his pocket watch. He made watches - and played violin - and drink to excess - and at the time of this photo had a wife elsewhere, of course unknown to grandmother. I have inherited many stories about this errant grandfather - and here he is now immortalised in sepia tones on some Edinburgh street with a wife far younger than himself and forever they will be going down the road and he'll be fingering his watch and she'll be clutching a bag under her arm and throwing him a look.
happy new year - to dead, alive and not yet born x