Today is May Day, traditionally the spring festival. Amazing how many pagan festivals Christianity just took over and made its own, imbuing them with different meanings. I suppose for religion to survive, it needed to do that in many places.
In the parking lot of a restaurant the other day, a freezing cold day, I noticed three old ladies sitting in their parked car, and having a grand old time, laughing and talking away! The one white-haired old woman was very small and could barely see over the dashboard in front of her. She was sunk into the seat.
She reminded me so of my own grandmother, who was a little bag of bones when she died. My granny Gracie loved a nice glass of wine with Sunday dinner and then sat and giggled on the couch until she nodded off.
That generation of women had so much potential during the first world war, and then afterwards they were subsumed by the patriarchal society of post-war Britain. She was a member of the women's auxiliary airforce in England, one of the women who laboured on the engines of aeroplanes, studied signals and all kinds of things. She also had wonderful artistic talent, had been to art school before the war when very few women attended, and could play the violin beautifully. After the war she was married to Gerald, a South African, moved to South Africa, had two babies and just gave up all that she had been before. She never picked up a violin, never drew another image, had a series of illnesses and eventually descended into osteoporosis and became bedridden. Such a very sweet person, so unrealised.
She left me her portfolio and her wedding ring when she died, and I promptly lost the wedding ring in the sea, to my chagrin. But her portfolio I still have, and several of her images are framed and hanging in my house. The last time my dad came to visit he was very confused with dementia, and one night, going upstairs to bed, he saw a beautiful nude standing figure that she had done, and asked "Anne dear, when did someone do this drawing of you?" I just told him, "Oh, when I was younger," and he, satisfied with the answer, carried on up the stairs, where, after some struggle, he found his bedroom.
I ran 2.54 miles today (4.08km) On one of my last circuits, I noticed the bees going crazy a little way from the hive, hovering around a tree trunk, and wondered if they were swarming. On my last circuit they had started to swarm, chaining and making a big teardrop shape on a small branch. It was not high and I knew that we could capture it and thereby create a new hive, as they fly with a virgin queen, so my old hive is stil viable with the old queen. I ran back and fetched all the equipment I needed, but alas, 15 minutes later when we arrived there with everything, they had flown! I was so disappointed and searched in a mile radius for about an hour, but to no avail. So they have gone off to be wild bees, and good luck to them!
My portrait today is of a kind of maypole-tree-god. In honour of May Day, which is something good to celebrate, to remember how things still grow, even though there is terrible oil pollution in the gulf of Mexico, which is very difficult to think of. Outside our bedroom window there is a tree-god's face, perfect eyes of branches, irises of pine-needles, a nose of a tree-trunk, and a beautiful moving mouth of pine branches and needles.
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