Day 243

My old man and the sea.

This evening we went to a party for the Senior class (the boys' last year) arranged by their class adviser.  It was a potluck dinner, and I had offered to bring chips and dips, which  takes the least effort, because I was at school today and knew I wouldn't have time to do anything else (plus I am lazy, especially anything to do with cooking!).  But chips and dips, you can't just take the packets, which is what the boys did, you should have a special plate which has a little bowl-affair in the middle for the dip, then you need to artfully arrange the chips all around this aforementioned bowl.  There were several of these on the tables, which put me to shame (well, not really).  So I came home with 5 unopened chip packets and three unopened dip tubs, which was all I bought, so we have lots for the weekend visitors!  Yay!

We went to the beach afterwards for Tim to take long-exposure images, which is what he is doing in this picture.  It has been hot hot hot all day, 94F (34.5C) with humidity, which generally I love, because I can always swim, but today I had to work, had to sit in steamy meetings, especially this afternoon, where we all had to watch the video of How to Use an Epipen, (on yourself), and How to Use an Epipen (on someone else), for the umpteenth time.  Good grief. 

This is a drawing I did of the nurse who gave the course.  She is a very small person with huge eyes and small claw-like hands, with which she gestures a lot when talking.  It reminds me of an Egon Schiele drawing.

Tim wouldn't let me swim in my bra and knickers, so I sat and watched the waves, and read my book, and watched the waves again.  And it was pleasantly cool there, compared to the heat just a smidgeon inland.  Later our friend came walking along the beach and she was quite game to join me but Tim said there were too many people and that he would have to go down the beach and not look, as she showed us that her bra was rather see-through!  So we made a date to swim in our actual swimsuits another day, and came home, where all the animals were waiting with empty tummies and hot tongues hanging out.  The little piggie now has her swimming pool, Lily is lying in her flattened state, even though she eats like a horse (do horses eat a lot?), on the kitchen tiles under the fan, and Molly has a nice full tummy and is lying under the table, also on the cool tiles.

This morning I got up early and ran my 5 km!  In 43 minutes!  Which is 8.35 seconds per km, not that good!  Anyway, all I am trying to do it maintain a good pace, not win anything, not gallop along, just maintain my pace and finish the course.  Which will be a feat, an accomplishment.  I began running almost a year ago, 60 steps running, 20 steps walking. 

Reciprocal photography.  Tim took a photograph of me too.

Day 242

This little fuzzy Woolly bear caterpillar was on my rose bush which I received from Emma for my birthday!  I am very partial to little caterpillars like this.

We watched a History channel programme tonight called Life After People.  Theorizing about how nature would take over if every human being were suddenly to die. 

I imagined all the animals which would die of starvation, stuck in people's houses, dogs, cats, guinea pigs, etc.  Apparently only the medium-size mongrel dogs which managed to escape their houses, would survive to eventually join packs of feral dogs.  The short-snouted and the long-nosed, those with little legs, and those bred too large, would all die off.
Other carnivores would soon follow, and there was some speculation about zoo animals which, if they managed to escape their boundaries, would probably become predators, especially the big cats.  Tigers roaming through Central Park.

To aid the investigators in their theory, the Ukrainian abandoned city Prypiat is observed, twenty years after the Chernobyl explosion nearby meant that its nearly 50 000 people had to be evacuated. And as so often happens with our easy access to information on the computer, from googling a site about Prypiat and what happened there, I came upon a striking short film of about 15 minutes long, (which I watched in its entirety, even though I am supposed to be finishing up here and going to bed) called The Door, about a little family and what happened to them.  And then found that the film is based on a true story about a man called Nikolai Kalugin and his wife and daughter, who were all evacuated from Prypiat.  An amazing piece, filmed like memories, with blue and white as the dominant colours, absolutely beautiful.

Prypiat is situated in the Red forest.   The initial radiation was enough to kill off all the wildlife, and many trees, but now there is a resurgence of life.  Wolves, beaver, moose have thrived, and Red deer are plentiful there, and they are hardly found in any other region.  The population of Russian wild boar is 10 to 15 times higher than outside the Exclusion Zone, or Zone of Alienation, an enormous largely rural area which used to be home to more than 120 000 people.  A soccer stadium still has cracked and broken bleacher seats, but the field is unrecognizable as a field, it has instead become a mixed deciduous forest.  In twenty years.  There are even some re-settlers, who the authorities eventually resigned themselves to, who live in the Zone.

Humans' mastery over nature has always been only an illusion.

Self-portrait - Black & White.

Day 241

Northern Leopard Frog.

These little frogs leapt away from my feet near the marshes at the Ipswich Reserve.  I could see leaping creatures which I supposed were frogs, but for the life of me I couldn't see them once they had landed, until I looked very very carefully.  Such good camouflage!  Such beautiful little frogs!

This morning I was going to run 5 km, but after 2 and a half, I started feeling light-headed.  It was very hot and I found the whole run hard-going, there was no easy part today.  So I slowed down and once I had run into the cooler forest I started feeling a little better, so I sprinted the last 100 yards to the finish line, so to speak, stopped and had some water, and then felt slightly better, but for the life of me I could not force my legs to begin running again. 

I ran 3.13km, at just under 8 minutes per km.  The Fun Run is on Thursday and I still have no idea if I can do it!

It was my last day of the long summer vacation today, I can't believe that I am beginning my 9th year at the International School tomorrow.  I am quite excited because a data-projector has been installed in the Art room, which will be a big change in my teaching style.  And it will be lovely to see all my students again on Friday, see how the younger ones have grown over the summer, and to hear where they have all been, these lucky world-travelers. 

So my last afternoon was spent on my beloved beach, with the most perfect waves, which were huge and broke far out, so that I could ride them in, zig-zagging down the breakers, again and again, pushing back out to the deep water, then surfing from the thrilling high point, feeling the power of the surging water around me.  Then lying in the hot sun to get warm again, reading, until my bones were unchilled and I could go back out again for another hour or so.  Bliss.

When I came home, Tim asked me if maybe I am a Selkie.  The Selkie myth originates in the Irish and Scottish traditions, where a seal can become a human woman.  She marries the man who finds her, but only remains human as long as he had hidden her sealskin.  If she finds it (and often it is one of her children who inadvertently finds it) she immediately leaves her human family and goes back to the sea to her seal life. 

I showered after supper and the floor of the shower was littered with seaweed, shed from my hair, so he had better have hidden my seal-pelt very well. 

Another collage, of one of my favourite subjects.

Day 240 (125 to go!)

The warrior and the princess. (seen at the Essex Music Festival)

How these roles are thrust upon us, and sometimes we just get inside them like a costume that we never take off. 

Having raised two girls and then later two boys, I can attest to the fact that boys and girls are innately different. 

Girls say, "Let's play Forest Families" (which were little animal [tiger, elephant, hippo, dog etc.] sort-of-figurine toys, for the uninitiated, that you could accumulate in families of mother, father and one or two children - Emma and Jess had about 50 that they collected over a period of two or three years) and then they would sit and play imaginary games with these little creatures as the protagonists.  For hours.  Or they would draw long narrative drawings.  For hours.  Or they would swing on the swings, and climb the loquat tree, but more often than not they were playing some collaborative imaginary game involving some characters.  They developed an entire game of paper people, where they drew the people with elaborate costumes, cut them out, and then invented whole intersecting lives for them.  They kept these paper people in boxes, they had probably over a hundred people at the height of their popularity.  Or else they were begging me to film their "stories" or 'dances' which starred them and their friends.  When girls fought, they called each other bad names and the worst insult they could say was, "I'll never be your friend again and you can't play with me anymore!"

Boys rush around toting weapons, sticks which are guns or swords, depending on the game at hand, and they are constantly arguing about who is the leader.  When I suggested once that the three friends should all be captains, and they could be captain number 1, captain number 2, etc., it immediately prompted an argument about who would be captain number 1!  They are constantly digging holes to find dinosaur bones, climbing the loquat tree and stepping across a large gap in order to get on to the roof, then dancing along the roof like little tightrope walkers, teaching younger kids how to climb up on their own rooves, then cutting the neighbour's telephone and cable wires.  When they work collaboratively it is to carry a heavy ladder between the two of them so that they can climb on the roof and not use the tree!  When I tried to teach them to read, as I had done so easily with the girls, they made it into a game in which they would both pack up laughing at each alphabet letter or word, so that after a few such episodes I gave up and let them learn at school!  They draw aeroplanes and rockets, swords and robots, and then they get up and rush about again. 

But we are all a mixture, aren't we?  My girls have the warrior in their souls, and my boys have the sensitivity which beholds beauty and is amazed.

And it is dangerous to stereotype, which does not lead to understanding.  Each sex has qualities which are different from the other, and perhaps this is why we work well together sometimes, and why we roil against one another too.

So here, at the end of the day, the third day on which I have not run (although I have walked many miles) I offer a very stupid little illustration (I am very very tired) of a wonderful Goethe saying, "One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words."  He would have been 261 today if he was still alive.

Day 239

Sunset reflected in the eyes of the greater male Bouwer Dragonfly, observed this evening in the Audubon Wildlife Reserve.

The viewing tower at the Reserve tonight was beautiful, groups of ducks hurtling in over our heads,, seemingly racing to get to their evening stopover, dipping and banking like much smaller birds, and then landing with sudden splashes in the marsh before us, to spend the night with their little orange legs dangling in the warm water of this marshy section of the Ipswich River.

We noticed two cormorants sitting high up in a dead tree, something I have never seen before.  It must be quite difficult for web-footed birds to perch on branches.  We actually went searching for Barred Owls, but sadly did not see any.  

Dreams are our creative selves making up stories, influenced by what we have seen and felt and imagined.  Amazing how real things seem, how you can smell and feel and touch and taste and everything is in grand technicolour!  Last night I dreamed that Tim and I were suddenly in charge of a tiny baby that we had to look after for some reason, and the baby was crying so hard, it was starving, but we had nothing with which to feed it, no formula, bottle, nothing.  So we were frantically driving to the hospital, where we would find the necessary things.  I was holding her and thinking that I could probably breast-feed her, after all, I breast-fed so many babies for so many years, why not this one? (It was a dream, remember?) When suddenly I felt the familiar heavy flow through those cauliflower-looking milk-glands and ducts, and that old customary prickle as the milk began to trickle out of my nipple.  I said to Tim, "It's ok, you can turn around and go home now, I can feed her!" and he regarded us in amazement as the milk continued to emerge and I latched the baby on where she fed hungrily. 

Today I finally and guiltily went into my beehive, my one remaining hive.  Last time I looked in the hive where the laying worker had set up her organisation, the bees had all died but earwigs had taken over, and there was a whole pile of them on the inside lid.  I banged them all off, put the lid back on, and left it again, so today I went into my Loonie Lefties hive and everything seems pretty good, not much honey in the supers but I do have three deeps full of honey in my freezer, so will get some at least this year.  (I am not a terribly sustained beekeeper, I tend to want them to do well and when they do it is great, and when they give me some honey that is a bonus, but generally I leave them to get on with things - what I love is standing in the middle of all the Celandine in the meadow and being hummed by all those bees, thrumming through my ears and into my body.  A piece of Happiness.)

So then I had to decide what to do with the empty hive.  I remembered that some of the frames were kind of old and blackened, and that I would put those aside for burning and only save the good more golden ones.  On opening the lid, I noticed that there was what looked like an old mouse's nest through about three of the frames, the old blackened ones, thank goodness, so I kind of upended the hive with all the frames because once before there had been a mouse nest, and three mice and I had squeaked in fright at one another!  I didn't think the nest was occupied though, for some reason.

I was casually sorting through everything when I noticed, with horror, these tiny creatures which looked like miniature pink pigs lying floundering on the ground!  There were tiny baby mice in this nest and I had just thrown them violently about!  There were seven, four were still in the nest-material, but three had been thrown out and one was lying on its back, crying with loud mouth wide open but no sound that I could hear.  I immediately knelt down and carefully scooped up three squirmy tiny pink things, each about half the size of my pinkie finger, and settled them in the nest with their siblings, hoping that the mother mouse would come back for them.  I remembered the dream, where I had saved a baby, and here the very next day I was destroying (possibly) a whole nest of babies!  I felt like the evil farmer in The Secret of NIMH.

And yes, here I know there are many readers who think what an idiot I am, saving vermin, for goodness' sake!

But these are wild mice living in the bush, where they are supposed to live.  They have their place in the food-chain. This little mother was just doing her mother-mouse job, finding the best possible location for her nest to keep her babies safe, which is all her responsibility.  She doesn't have the benefit of a husband to help provide for the little ones, there is no one in the dark night to rescue her but herself.  She had gathered soft stuff and woven a perfect little nest to hold the young.  She is actually worthy of admiration, particularly since this little mouse did come back for her babies, and transported all seven of them somewhere else.  I went back about an hour later to check on them, and they were all gone, carefully, with nothing disturbed, so I know another animal had not eaten them.  And I wish her luck.

I know that other people would have killed them, but faced with those little pink lives, there was no way I could do it.  That little mouth crying silently, broke my silly heart. 

(Lab rats and mice have no protection under the law, they are the only animals which don't.  I am very grateful for all the scientists who have developed better and different ways of testing medicines and other experiments so that lab animals like chimps and dogs and cats are not used as much anymore.  The ubiquitous rats and mice are still a common lab animal, however.)

A collage tonight - Water/Life.

Day 238

Bryan and Clara.

Even though this image is not sharp, it is priceless because the tiny baby is echoing the dad's smile!  She is only 4 days old, the sweetest, most newly-hatched human being I know. 

Babies are so utterly useless that it's lucky they enchant us so with their sweet looks, enticing us to love them and care for them.  They can't really do anything much for quite a while.  Funny that human babies are so helpless amongst all the mammals.  We take ages to grow that big brain in that big head.   But there she is, just lying there fast asleep, and I instantly fall in love with her, even though I am only an honorary great-aunt, there is no blood relation here.  What power.

I was careful to pay a lot of attention to the dear little big brother, who is all of two and a third, and has now to contend with a little sister who will, through no fault of her own, divert a lot of his previously undiluted attention away from him, and will therefore be somewhat resented for a while.

I was the youngest of three children, and a laat-lammetjie, which means that I came along a lot later than the other two.  So I never had to deal with any of that sibling jealousy myself, and was loved and adored by everyone in my family just because it was such a long time since there had been a baby in the house.

Youngest children are the luckiest, I think, because mostly your siblings love you or tolerate you and also you are kind of left to your own devices because your parents are tired of raising children, they've used the others as guinea-pigs and so can't be so bothered with all the rules and strictness.  They just love you and let you get on with it.

This is a picture my mother took of Emma when Jess was about to be born, while I was in labour in the hospital, in fact.  I think it is a perfect image of how it feels for the older sibling.

So, no self-portrait tonight, because it was a long journey out there to see the newborn Clara and her family and it is late late, past pumpkin-time! 

So, a portrait of Clara which I took with my new "nifty-fifty" lens, as Tim calls it.  Serenity.

New-born babies resemble one another a lot.  You can't really see what they are going to look like when they are older.  When Jess was born she was enormous and rolypoly fat, and looked like her paternal grandfather, who was not the most handsome man!  And Nicholas was this long skinny thing and looked like a puppy which still needed to grow into its skin.  Emma was so blonde that she seemed bald until she was about six months old, and when Matthew was a newborn, he had these enormous eyes which took up most of his face.

Day 237

Matt and I after surfing.

Crazy wet weather still, with huge waves.  Matt tried surfing and got up a few times, and I just rode the waves in my usual fashion on my board.  Today there was one other surfer, but he stayed closer to shore, at the same level as me, whereas Matthew went out really far.  I kept looking for the black bobbing head, out in the raging waters, and started worrying, because there was a strong riptide and he looked so small out there, and he is my baby, after all. 

But then I talked myself out of it, telling myself that he is 18 years old, a strong strong swimmer (one of the best on the team), and someone who keeps his head, so if he got swept out by the riptide he would know not to panic, but to let it take him until he couldn't feel it anymore, and then swim into shore from another vantage point, at the end of the beach, or even on to the island.  So I caught as many waves as I could, and just enjoyed myself, checking on his whereabouts every now and then, until it was time to go. 

It has been raining for three days now, non-stop, and everything is damp, my running shoes smell like they are growing, sand from the beach has over-run the bathroom, all the towels are wet, and it feels like we're in the wonderful Garcia Marquez book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, where it rained for four years, eleven months and two days.

Earlier I went for a run in this pelting rain, so that after a minute or so I was utterly slick with water, I might as well have jumped into a pool, I was wet as a seal.  I ran and ran, the middle part is really good, easy running, the first and last km just get me, I don't know if the first is just difficult because I am starting out and all the joints are not yet oiled, the lungs not yet warmed up, the brain not yet in gear, and then the last might be psychological, getting over that hump and revving your engine for that last great (for me) effort. 

So I discovered that I had run 5.02 km in 46 minutes, which means just over 9 mins per km!  I did have to battle through mud and puddles and duck under several rain-heavy overhanging branches each circuit, so maybe it wasn't that bad. 

So this is my photographic self-portrait in the meadow after the run, looking like a drowned rat, smiling.

Day 236

55/'55. 

What a lovely day I had!  Woken up at 8 o'clock with all the men in my family climbing on to my bed and collapsing wherever they fell, the boys because Tim had woken them so early, and Tim because he had been up since 3 am to co-ordinate with his colleagues in France!  There were beautiful hand-made cards and poems and thoughtful presents. Then later, phone calls, with many melodic versions of the Happy Birthday song, emails, cards, flowers, presents, taken out for a delicious lunch in Rockport by my friend Markie, and then an hour-long swim in my beautiful wild ocean with a gift of waves just for me, not another soul in the sea, only people dressed in winter coats walking their dogs and children on the windswept beach.  The rushing tide had carved hills and valleys in the sand under the water near the shoreline, so I resembled a drunk person each time I fought my way back out to the far beginnings of waves, the sand suddenly giving way to my trusting leg, causing me to suddenly disappear underwater, then coming up to about waist-height with the next step on to a sand-bar.  But, once I was riding a wave, I would fly, dipping and soaring like a swallow. (I was rather frozen by the time I finally arrived home, where I stood, stripped of my swimsuit and wrapped in a blanket by Tim, while I spoke on the phone to Emma in London who had sent me a red-rose bush!)

Some days, it is a rare thing, you are perhaps driving alone in your car along a country road, where the fields a couple of days ago were brown and now with all the rain they have changed, chameleon-like, become green once more, and quite suddenly you feel a strong sense of what-can-be-called-happiness, you have this grand perspective on life, you can see all the years of your own journey, your life made of memories, a long prose-poem beginning in a sunny country surrounded by love, and flowing in a lyrical way, filled with discoveries dark and light, as you evolve your own soul, as your body develops and becomes strong at last, this woman's body which grows and nurtures new beings into life, giving birth to four amazing individuals whom you love with all of your heart, with enormous unfathomable love, these children of yours who come along with you, following you on your creative path and then finding their own directions, and along the way you find this lovely man, this man whose footprints are always next to yours, whose big heart you listen to in the night, lying on his chest, whose body you have known and loved since you were twenty-nine years old,  who took your hand to leap together across the wide divide between the Southern and Northern hemispheres. 

And your heart is full, full of all your people, your ancestors, your beloved mother and father, the faces of your cherished children, your dear husband, your sister and brother, your cousins, your best friend, all your relatives, your old and new friends.  It is full of the Blue Jays in your pines, the Cape Robins on the lawn at 10 Forest Drive, the hadedas poking in the compost at 16 Cross Street,  your Silver-oak tree with the branch high above the ground where you contemplated your ten-year old life, your green and pleasant meadow of yellow Celandine buzzing with bees, your hot South African sun and your drifting New England snow, the green of the earth and the rainbow colours of your painting palette.  It is full of all the dogs and cats (and one bat, 4 guinea pigs and a hamster) you have loved, full of all the pain you have ever felt, all the delight you have ever experienced, all the books you have ever read, all the music that has danced across your brain, all the full moons you have ever seen.  It is full of the warm and wild Indian Ocean which held you always in its comfortable embrace, the beauteous quartzite sandstone of Table Mountain and the hills and dales and moody North Atlantic Ocean of Massachusetts.  It is full of love and sex and life and death.

You feel for an instant that you can intuit why people do the things they do, you forgive ignorance (for a very brief second) you understand your small place in the vastness of all the people on earth, all the messy history of our planet.  It is a great comprehension, a golden moment. 

This is an impressionist photograph of my mother when she was young and beautiful, sitting in a boat, her hair blowing in the sun, in love with my father, who took the picture with adoring eyes, many years before they made me.  This is where I began.

Day 235

Angelina listening intently to me.

Tim took this photograph, which is one of his rejects actually, because it is not perfectly in focus, but I love it, love her expression, so concentrated, so forthrightly holding my gaze, an ability she has had since she was a tiny baby.

And my friend's daughter had a new little girl today, named Clara, who resembles her grandmother, I think.  So I am an honorary great-aunt! 

Today huge waves were predicted, part of the lovely storms and rain we are experiencing.  So I went to run on the beach first, then swim afterwards, but only managed the running, as the choppy waves were being blown backward and none of them completed their rush to the shore well enough to be good for boogie-boarding.  In fact three surfers arrived and were preparing to go in as I began my run, and as I finished, about 25 minutes later, they were getting out, complaining about aforementioned waves!

Dead Monarch on the sand

It is lovely to run on a beach, even with the wind and rain stinging your face every time you turn at the end of the shore to run in the opposite direction.  I forgot my pedometer, so just ran for about 25 minutes, there and back and there and back and halfway there again.  So easy with no hills, no mouseholes or overhung branches to avoid, just clean sea-sand, with the tide coming in so that each time I ran back along my footprints, they were gone or barely visible, erased by the surging water.  I am trying very hard to keep up a good pace the entire run, so that by the time I run the Fun Run next Thursday I am used to not slacking.

Tomorrow is my Beddian Birthday, named after a firefighter who inspired a mathematical theory about how many people will reach the same age as their birth-year the next even year, as apparently it can only happen in an even year, which stands to reason if you consider each time that you are doubling the number, the product of which will always be even.  You can look it up if you are interested in such things.  I was born in 1955 and I turn 55 tomorrow, in 2010, which makes it a kind of special birthday! 

Since I have spent the better part of the night and today getting to the end of The Girl who Played with Fire, about which I have terribly mixed feelings, a book which drew me in and onward until I turned each page frantically wanting to know what happened.

But also a poorly written book, with so much weird unnecessary detail like how much furniture the main character bought at IKEA, including how much it cost, or what Mikael Blomkvist put on the irrelevant sandwich he made himself when he woke up and couldn't sleep.  And such out-of-character things such as the breast implant operation Lisbeth Salander decides to have done, which seems to me solely there to provide gratuitous nudity in the movie, which is all very well, but doesn't make sense, considering her history.

I did like the minor mathematical theme and the importance of laptops, email, computer hacking, all this contemporary technology used to communicate, to find out things, throughout the book.  And the fact that the author brings to light so much abuse of women, and then manufactures this wonderfully strong and intelligent woman as his central protagonist, who beats up the baddies and gets even with them in very clever ways.  The first book's Swedish title is "Men who Hate Women", and it seems as if the world is filled with such men. 

I will, however, definitely read the last one in the trilogy, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.  So I admit that I am hooked!

All the while I was reading the book I knew that a man was writing it, which is not something you think of when reading someone like Patrick White or Tim Winton (both Australian male authors, funnily enough) or Sarah Hall (British).  These authors write from the point-of-view of either sex with utter accuracy and believability. 

I don't feel like I have enough time for a drawing, so my portrait tonight  is a photographic creation, a composite image of a dragonfly and a dewy spiderweb from yesterday's morning meadow. 

Day 234

Angelina and her daddy.

This little girl continues to charm and enchant, as she grows, with her twinkling eyes and her engaging gaze.  She is the sweetest happiest little nearly eight-month-old ever! 

Tim took the most beautiful pictures of her in her white christening dress, (this is my photograph, taken with my little point&shoot) while she sat on the couch like a little model princess, working the crowd, jitterbugging with the top half of her body to her own personal music as babies do, singing her little song-like utterances, and generally having the four adoring adults in attendance in stitches of laughter.

Later she fell asleep in my arms, while I was stroking her head, her soft hair in tight tight curls, so trusting, these little creatures!  Her dad is very funny.  When her mom took her away to bed, I mentioned that where she had been lying on me had been so warm, and now it was a little cold absence in my arms.  He said, "Yes, I'm looking forward to winter, I'm going to warm my feet on her."

So today I ran for 30 minutes, according to the website I consulted about training for a 5km run.  They say you should do different times, not worry about distance so much as trying to run faster.  I ran 3.94 km in that time, which is 7 min 30 secs per km.  Not bad, but it was not 5km, so I don't think it really counts, as that last km really gets me.

It was lovely though, my gentle meadow welcomed me back, so much kinder on the legs than the hard asphalt road, and greenery to look at, a soft drizzling rain for part of the way, and a small brown bird which rushed across my path and then took off, looking for all the world like a mouse had suddenly taken flight!

Tonight a picture of Angelina, my hand caressing her, my old wrinkly hand juxtaposed against her young soft sleeping face.

Day 233

Mariners versus Townies.  (Mariners win 3-1, Mariners in blue, picture courtesy of Tim) .

Our Intertown Twilight League (ITL) Baseball tournament is over 80 years old, with teams from seven towns in the area, the oldest active amateur baseball league in the country, apparently.  Today we watched the Manchester Mariners (our team) play the Rockport Townies, and win the whole tournament!  The baseball diamond was in Rockport, a very old one called Evans Field, with a forest on one side, and a beautiful stone pavilion which houses the bleachers. 

Sitting there, getting excited about my team and cheering them on when they did something good, I felt as though I was sitting right in the middle of a little bit of Americana, or a scene straight out of a movie. 

Both teams have passionate supporters shouting suggestions to their own team and the other team too.  The spectators sit bickering in a friendly manner with one another.  It is a pleasant Saturday afternoon outing, and it's free.  So many people brought their dogs.  There was a man with a young German Shepherd dog, which complained, whimpering, about having to walk up the crazy benches. It walked gingerly, placing its enormous paws very carefully but not knowing really where to put them!  Another little bulldog won the heart of a beautiful little mixed-race girl, who had bright blond frizzy hair and toffee-coloured skin.  And a border collie lay obediently at the feet of its mistress in the row just below us.  An old man smoked a placid pipe sitting on his beach chair at the side of the field, and everyone was smiling and happy. 

No running today, and as I have finally succumbed to the Stieg Larsson trilogy, I am going to bed with my book, so here is a photograph for the portrait tonight, that Jess took on the way to the Harbor Islands the day before they left.  As you can see, I was still happy then!

Day 232

Sand-covered girl.

My friend's beautiful 12 year-old daughter, at that in-between stage, still a little girl but also a girl becoming a woman.  Playfulness mixed with very strong opinions.

So today I got up with dread, knowing that I was going to run 5km on a road for the first time.  It seemed a daunting prospect, like going to the principal's office, and I prepared carefully, wearing shorts (I usually wear long cotton trousers tucked into socks to prevent ticks crawling up my legs), socks that are not too thick so that your toes go numb after a while, nor too thin that the socks gradually slide down your foot into your shoe.  I only have two pairs of socks which fit this description, which are perfect.  I also wore an old swimsuit top to help with the bouncing, and a vest over that.  On my head a green Celtics fan cap backwards, to keep the hair out of my face, and the last accessory, sunglasses.  I parked, locked my car, hid the key under a rock, stretched a few times, and off I went!

It was beautiful, marshes on either side, just a few houses lodged atop small knolls, a million tree swallows perched on the telephone wires, taking off in formations as I approached with my rhythmic clapping tread, a sound I am unused to hearing.

After the first downhill I could see the end, around the bend, and it didn't look too far.  I made it there and back easily, and changed my mind about just doing it once today, as Tim had suggested.  But halfway there, I hit a wall again, and had to hurl myself forward to various helping hymns pounded out by the voice in my head (this could be a poem, did you see all the 'h' alliteration in that sentence?).  When I got to the car, (the last uphill is killing), it was exactly 40 minutes since I began. (Nick can do 5km in less than half my best time!)

The Fun Run begins at 6.30 and the awards ceremony is at 7.30, so hopefully I will make it before that begins.

My knees are a bit tender though, unaccustomed to that hard road.  So I will train both in the meadow and on the road.  After doing a bit of research into training for a 5km run, I am going to run every other day until the actual race. 

This afternoon, remembering a beach chair in the garage that someone gave me, I duly folded it and loaded it into the car, only to discover when I was unfolding it on the beach, a stranded Daddy-Long-Legs spider, who leaped on to the hot sand and immediately started struggling with Death.  So I picked her up by one leg, very gently, (she went absolutely limp when this happened) and carefully walked to the dunes, which enjoy a plentiful vegetation of beach-roses and various beach-grasses.  I cautiously set her down and she thought a bit, then came to life and took off rapidly in the right direction, away from the beach.    I hope she makes it, such a different habitat from the corner of a cool garage.  Or perhaps she will become a partial meal for one of the beautiful tree swallows I see there all the time. 

Tonight a picture of my Nicholas. 

Day 231

Queen Anne's Lace at the beach.

Oh the glorious, the amazing, the beautiful, the incredible ocean, down whose waves I rush, speeding across clear water I see seaweed, little fish, clean sandy bottom, until I arrive near the shore, steer my board to the left or right, slide off, and rush back out to do it all over again.

I have found a very deserted little back-road called Island Road, a cul-de-sac, 1.6 miles to the end and back, so if I run this twice it will be 5 km.  I think I need to run on a real road if that is what the race will be on.  It seemed, driving it today, like an awfully long way, just once, let alone running it twice!  Tomorrow morning will be the test, and my stomach trembles at the thought.

Solar power, it's what we want, isn't it, renewable energy from the sun?  Better than mining coal, better for the environment?  Well, it's not so simple, actually.  I listened to a programme on a planned large-scale (huge - thousands of acres) solar development in the Panoche Valley in California, with a semi-desert micro-climate.  The company states that the solar panels will provide shade for grazing sheep and the panels will collect moisture for plant growth around them. 

However, an Environmental Impact Assessment has recently been done on this land and evidence of many species has been found, including some endangered species.  So now the residents of the valley are up in arms, protesting this development of 16 000 acres.  And so  there will be prolonged court cases etc., for years to come, and it may never get going. 

I don't know which side I am on, because on the one hand I am for the animals and plants, the wild land, but on the other, I am for renewable energy, which I believe is the answer, or one of the answers, something that will go a small way to perhaps healing some of what we have done to the earth.  The company, Solargen, has offered to buy up 12 000 acres of adjacent land so that all the animals can go there, but really, how does one accomplish that?  By telling all the displaced animals, "Hey, look, just over that hill, there's another 12 000 acres just for you!"

Where I grew up, where we had that magical childhood, was in a Garden City called Pinelands, a place first envisaged by a man called Ebenezer Howard, who grew up during the Second Industrial Revolution in England, which began with the invention of steam-powered ships, trains and such.  Studying the monotony, grime and ugliness of the industrial towns, he envisioned homes for people on the outskirts of these towns, which incorporated gardens and other green spaces.  He wanted to replace tenements with homes standing on their own grounds, he believed that people would be better off if they maintained that important link with nature, so his idea would connect town and country.

In 1918, the Spanish Influenza pandemic raged through Cape Town and a Mr Richard Stutterford became interested in Howard's ideas, as he believed that the death toll could have been much lower with different housing.  He put forth his idea to the govt of the time, and eventually, in 1919, he was given a pine plantation called Uitvlugt, which became the beautiful suburb of my childhood, where every street had a pretty name, none of which ended in "Street". The roads were called, "Pleasant Place", "Forest Drive", "North Way", "Serpentine" "The Bend".  And everywhere there were open green leafy spaces. I played for hours in "The Field" behind my house, rode my bike down Union Ave to my friend's house, knew all the trees where you could find squirrels, all the best places to crack pine-nuts, took short-cuts through all the neighbours' gardens, roller-skated up and down Peak Drive, built dams in the gutters with my cousins in Camp Road. 

A lovely story, but again, if more and more garden cities had been developed, a much larger portion of the country would be settled, so less arable land and less wild land for flora and fauna.  Why do such good things always have to have a down side? (Not even to mention the worst of it, that this was all only for white people!)

Jess looking pensive, which is how I feel tonight.

Day 230

Little girl at India Day.

The boys are so independent now that they have a car.  I barely see them, which is in the nature of things, I suppose.  They are home, and then gone, and then home again to eat huge amounts of food, and then off they go again!  I miss driving them places, with those long deep talks that cars seem to eventuate.

These sons, who have gone largely un-noticed in my writings of late, so much focus on that brief brilliant visit of the girls.

Nick, my performer, the artist, the one with the pure clear singing voice, the self-doubter, the tall long-boned tree of a young man, the bluest of eyes, the widest of smiles, the affectionate, the lover of all things beautiful.  The one who did not pass his driver's test the first time, to his great chagrin, the one who missed me the two days I was in Vermont.

Matthew, who did pass his driver's test, and felt the guilt of a twin for doing so.  The one who flows through life, who makes people laugh, including his brother, who still loses everything, struggles to keep track of his possessions, who has a different, more lateral way of thinking.  The one who is careful of people's feelings, who knows when I am sad.

These boys who both hug me to their chests, towering over me, who brush their teeth next to me, all of us still sharing a bathroom amicably.  They look at each other and themselves, and me, in the big bathroom mirror over the sink, making fun of my small size, laughing at me, the one who has become small, such a strange thing, this life which makes you the shortest one of your entire family!  When they were little, after their bath we would dress them in front of a similar large mirror at 16 Cross Street, and then we would sometimes ask them, "Who's Matty?" or "Who's Nick?" and they wouldn't know, they were still so close to that oneness in the womb, they would point at the other, then, with faces like a question, confusedly at themselves.  Tim and I would laugh and laugh at these dear little creatures we had made, two at the same time, how amazing!

These boys who make me tea with honey and Marie biscuits to dunk, and then sit drinking and dipping with me at the kitchen table, telling me stories of their days with their friends, how they jump from high cliffs into the sea, or from a 30 foot tower into the reservoir.  How boys love these thrills, these challenges!  These boys who hate to see me cry, these big strong men who were once my tiny silky-haired babies, not so long ago, but their whole lifetimes ago.

Today I ran 2.68 miles (4.31 km).  The first three went really well, although I had forgotten to put on my watch and was not carrying a cellphone, so I don't know how fast I was, but I tried to keep a good pace, which turned out to be too fast, because I ran out of steam completely!  Aaargh!  My heart was pounding in my head, and I felt at times very high off the ground (which is wrong because as I mentioned before I am rather short) and at other times I could see every leaf and grain of soil on the ground before me, I was that close!

I didn't run yesterday, instead had a great workout in two hour-long swims in the ocean, surfing on huge waves, diving under, running back in after taking the long long ride in to shore, wonderful!  But tonight I walk on stiff wooden legs.  Will I make it, this 5km run?

A strange angled drawing.  What an enormous nose I possess!

Day 229

Girl having a henna tattoo done at India Day at the Hatch Shell in Boston.

The first case of EEE (Eastern Equine Encephalitis) in humans, or West Nile Virus, has been reported in Rhode Island, so there has been spraying of southeastern Massachusetts and various warnings on the radio.  I heard an expert talking last night, and he said "Mammal-butting mosquitoes pose the greatest threat to humans..." and instantly there was this image in my head.


It was my brother's birthday on Saturday.  His name is the same as my husband's, Timothy John.  He is 62, seven years older than I am.  He was a typical older brother, frequently holding me down and tickling me to near asphyxiation, but also a sweet brother quite often, taking me riding with him, that hand on my back, pushing me along so that I was flying.  I often accompanied him and his two best friends, together they were called "The Three Musketeers", and I became the honorary fourth musketeer every now and then.  I don't think my mother asked him to take me, I think he just enjoyed my company.

He built a very tall tree-house once when I was four or five, and when it was finished pulled me up in a bucket on a pulley he had rigged up.  I have a clear memory of seeing the neighbours' houses like I had never seen them before, also the large bum and then rapidly diminishing figure of the old lady behind us working in her garden, kneeling to pull up weeds.

He became the source of all  my worldly knowledge of things about which it was difficult to ask my parents.  We had a warm and close relationship, a mutual love of literature, poetry and the music of the day, and I felt great empathy for him when girlfriends broke up with him, or something made him sad.

He went to study at Edinburgh University and never returned, so we have lived on different continents for most of our very different lives, but when we are together we connect with an immediacy born of this bond of blood.  Once I had not seen him for ten years, and went to the airport in Cape Town to meet him, accompanying a number of other excited family members.  When I saw his tall figure coming through the International Arrivals door, my eyes just fountained tears, completely unexpected, I was utterly overcome with emotion.  He greeted several people and then saw me standing there in such distress, strode over and just enfolded me in his long arms. 

He chose to have a family reunion for his 60th birthday here with us in Massachusetts, although in the end my sister couldn't join us because she had broken her ankle!  And without our parents either, who had both died quite recently.  For his present I painted a picture of our parents when they were young, standing at the base of their family tree, the branches my older sister, my brother and myself.  I also made him a book of  "The Dandelion Girl", a beautiful science fiction short story he had given me to read so many years ago.

Siblings are forever bound together, attached by the invisible thread of early memories.

Day 228

Mother and two children.

These people were sitting in front of us yesterday and I took several pictures of them.  They sat close together, touching, and I noticed this about most of the groups, people's private space is much smaller than with white people, it is rather like the Xhosa in South Africa.  Everyone touching, and people sit just about on top of each other.

I remember my first year of teaching at a black school, Jongilanga High School in Kwelerha, outside East London.  One day I was sitting at the teacher's desk at the front of the class, marking books while the students were completing work at their desks.  One kid came up to ask me a question and as she did so she kind of leaned on my back, like my own child would have.  And then she saw something,  a picture in a book, perhaps, because I showed and drew a lot of pictures to explain unfathomable English words, and she exclaimed over it, and a whole lot of students then came up to have a look for themselves, and in the end I felt as though I was at the bottom of a rugby scrum, everyone leaning on top of me!  It was quite shocking for me, and also an honour, in a way, because I felt as though I had been accepted, they had forgotten I was this strange white teacher, the only one at the school, and I was now one of them. 

I ran 3.34 miles (5.37 km) today (thanks Brent!), still ostensibly training for the Fun Run.  I took 46 minutes, which is 8 minutes 33 seconds per km. 

I am rather sick of  "Land of the Silverbirch" as my tune, so ran for some distance to a reggae song "We'll be together..... with a roof right over our head....Is this love, is this love, is this love, is this love that I'm feeling?" which was good for the first km or two, but then I needed to speed up and found that all the hymns I ever knew, which are also good as lullabies for getting babies to go to sleep, are great for running!  "There is a green hill far away, without a city wall (Emma thought it went, 'without a city hall') worked really well.  And carols too came into my head.  Amazing, all the words that are stored in there, countless verses of hymns from my school days, where at assembly we would sing a different hymn each day. 

There were wonderful waves predicted for the beach today so although the weather was cool and cloudy, I went to take advantage of them.  After an hour in the water, enjoying huge waves, some quite scary, I scanned the few people on the beach for a kind face, and decided to ask a sweet middle-aged woman who was sitting alone, if she would take a photograph of me with my boogie-board for my blog.  On the way there I stood in a hole some child had dug and suddenly collapsed on the sand, although no one saw, I don't think.  So by the time I got to her I was fairly covered in sand.  Neverthless, I stood and smiled for ages, and then she said I should check because she wasn't sure if it had taken.  So I pressed the little button which allows you to see the latest photograph on the camera's memory and sure enough, there I was.  So she said, "Let's just take another for good measure", and I agreed. 

When I got home I discovered that the camera had been set on video, from India Day yesterday, and so there are two videos of me standing with a forced smile for about a minute each time!  A seagull comes into the frame and goes right across to exit on the other side. 

Day 227

Little girl on fence.

Indian Independence Day today, celebrating 63 years of independence from 200 years of British rule.  There was a cultural celebration at the Hatch Shell in Boston, next to the Charles River, where first children and then adults performed Bollywood-style dances, all decked out in bright colours, bedecked with gold and silver and other shiny things. 

Indians really are the most beautiful people in the world, I think.  Maybe everyone should just inter-marry with Indian people, and then the whole world would be sort of toffee-coloured and lovely-looking, and no one would be prejudiced against anyone ever again, because we'd all be the same colour anyway.

Barney Frank, the celebrated gay Massachusetts congressman of the gravelly voice, whose  actions and words live up to his last name, gave a speech about America being a land of immigrants and how that means that we are a strong bunch of people, because immigrants are more often than not hard workers, with an entrepreneurial spirit, boldly leaping into the unknown, to make a better life for themselves and their families.  Which made me feel quite good too.   Although our girls could not be part of that better life, more's the pity.

Tim and I went in to Boston on the orange-line train, which we have not done for such a long time.  When we first moved to America we lived right near the city, just a few T-stops away, and went in quite frequently. It was always an adventure, finding our way, everything strange and sometimes difficult and often exciting.  Now we are old hands, although it often amazes me how we know our way around now.  We have all those new maps imprinted on our brains, we know how to use the machine to put more money on a charlie-card, the ticket needed for the T, we know where to get off and change to a different colour train in order to get where we are going. We can even usually give lost people directions!

On the way home today, as we got on to the T, a girl further down the carriage had fallen off her seat, it seemed, and people were helping her up.  She was saying, "I don't feel very well..." and looking rather pale and confused.  People were wonderfully helpful - a middle-aged woman and her husband sort of took charge of her, gave her their water-bottle and made her drink, then suggested that perhaps she needed something sweet, so an old man across the aisle offered a piece of gum, and a young man standing near the door gave her a whole bag of candy!  And then the middle-aged woman sat next to her and chatted away to her, asking her questions, cheering her up, and slowly the colour came back into her face, and by the time her good samaritans reached their station she was fine, and once they had left her I could hear her telling someone on the other end of her cellphone the whole story.  And I thought of Barney Frank's speech, because all the people in this story, all the people in our carriage, came from every corner of the earth originally, African, Chinese, Korean, European, and mixtures of races too, and everyone worked together to fix one girl.  Those who didn't do anything constructive smiled at one another when she was looking better, and watched her carefully once the original caregivers had left the train, ready to offer more help if needed.  Altruism right there in front of our eyes.

(Some neurobiologists believe that altruism is not a superior moral faculty but actually hard-wired into the brain, something which gives us pleasure.  Research has shown that altruistic deeds activate the mesolimbic reward pathway in the brain in the same way as food and sex. 

I ran 5.04 km this morning.  Pushed and pushed, because 5km is hard for me.   A few weeks ago I received a 5km fun-run flier in the mail and suddenly I had a grand ambition that I might run it on the 2nd September, but the thought is fading fast.  I think the fastest runners come in at about 15 minutes, so by the time I hobbled in at 45 to 50 minutes, everyone would have left already!  Plus running is such a private thing for me, I jog through the meadow with not a soul in sight, no one to see my breasts bobbing up and down, my face becoming more and more pink, sweat dripping everywhere.  It's not a pretty sight!  And also I think it would be so de-motivating to have every last runner slide on by me, and come in stone-last!

Day 226

I have been up since 3.45 am!  To drive over an hour in order to watch (and photograph) about 20 hot air balloons take off from a field in Western Massachusetts. 

What induced someone to invent such a thing, to think that it was possible to inflate a huge balloon made of some light fabric, fill it with hot air, tie a basket under it in which to put human beings, and then float away, up into the sky to go with the breeze to wherever, and then let out the hot air slowly so as to descend in another spot? 

Amazing though, the designs and colours of these beautiful quiet craft sailing through the air.  Astounding how they get a flat mass of nylon fabric to billow out and bulge (with a giant fan), and then how they heat this air inside the balloon (with a propane burner) and how a whole crew has to work together to make it all happen, so that at the last moment the lucky passengers can climb into the basket and finally mount the air and drift away, multi-hued spheres like giant Chinese lanterns.

Anticipation.

Late night and I have been up for just over 20 hours, just back from a lovely dinner with friends, I am so tired that I feel quite ill.  So there is no drawing again, just this self-portrait from a bridge near the balloon field.

Day 225 (Friday the 13th)

Three siblings on a trampoline.

Today was almost perfect, (as perfect as it can be without my daughters) beautiful weather, wonderful company all day!  The beach was sunny and warm, the North Atlantic looked and felt like my friendly childhood Indian Ocean.  There were little waves for child boogie-boarders, lots of swimming and interesting conversations between the generations.

I taught a woman how to boogie-board, well no, I didn't actually, she is my first failure, she didn't even manage to catch one wave! 

She came up to me in the water, introduced herself and told me she had just bought her first boogie-board today and could I teach her, because she had been studying everyone and I looked as though I was a pro!  (I think she just thought I had a kind face)  So I used all the tried and trusted methods, but nothing seemed to work.  I even attempted to push her off on a wave but she was quite a hefty woman and that didn't go anywhere either!  She eventually went out after telling me that I was a very good teacher, she was just a useless student.  Poor woman. 

On the way home, my friend's daughter and I were discussing the best way to tell someone how to catch a wave, and it is really hard to explain.  She came to the conclusion that she and I were probably just born with that knowledge of the right time to leap on the board and sail down the wave!  While other people were born with a deficiency in that respect.

Finding ourselves without anyone to make dinner for, as the boys were out with friends, Tim and I walked out for a romantic evening and dined outside on the river at Tom O'Shea's.  Walking home afterwards we might have been arrested for being drunk and disorderly, because we were laughing so much playing the walking game that we almost fell over, and eventually we were both coughing and spluttering from a lack of oxygen, I suppose. 

A slice of lemon-moon hung in the blue-black sky as we made our way up our steep steep driveway and then into our lovely house, and it peeked in at us as we lay in the bath together in our usual way, and then to bed.

Day 224

Two Eastern Blue butterflies.

The meadow was alive with butterflies and bees this sunny morning as Molly and I walked out. It makes you happy just to be in their midst.

There is a tall sad dead tree near Refrigerator Corner.  Ivy has taken pity on it and covered its trunk and lower branches, but at the top of all this green abundance a few boughs still poke out into the sky.

This evening a gathering of tree swallows in these top-most limbs, living decorations.  I could hear them chatting to one another.  Perhaps it's like sitting on the deck with your family, drinking beer after a long hot day, recounting the events of work and home.

I wondered if the tree appreciated the attention, did not feel so worthless for a short while.

The little trees that all live inside with us in the cold months, dream all winter long of summer, when they get to feel the sun and the rain, when the wind ripples through their slender branches, birds perch on them and flit through them, and at night they watch the stars circle around us.

Running into the meadow late in the afternoon, I was halfway up Heartbreak Hill when I felt someone staring at me, and glanced across the field to find a deer in mid-chew, wondering what on earth I was doing, charging up the other side!  I stopped dead and stared right back, at the handsome ears, the quick and brilliant eyes.  But as soon as I reached for my camera she bolted, snorting and flashing her white tail at the black dog and me.

Apparently the Perseid Meteor shower is best tonight, between 12 and 4am, but there were still a few clouds and I saw none when I took Molly out a few minutes ago at 12.31.

Tim always complains about the movies I order from Netflix, because they are often really depressing indie movies, or strange foreign stories that go on and on and never seem to get anywhere.  Tonight we watched one that he ordered, called Departures. He couldn't believe it came with his name on the envelope!

It's a Japanese movie about a young cellist in Tokyo who loses his job when the orchestra disintegrates from lack of funding, so he goes back to his small town where his mother who recently died had left him a house, and has to find a job.  The one he happens on is that of an 'encoffiner', an undertaker, which eventually turns out to be his calling.  It is a beautiful little movie, maybe a little long, but so interesting and moving.   Japanese customs involving the dead are highly ritualised, and everything that is done to prepare the body for burial or cremation is done in a very beautiful way right there in front of the entire family, all the children and relatives.   And at the end of the ceremony, when the undertaker has washed the body with great care and privacy, under a beautiful cloth the entire time, and then he has dressed the person, and made the face look beautiful again, each person who is there to pay their respects comes up individually and receives a little dampened cloth with which they bathe the dead one's face.   It is very beautiful, and people can add their own touches, like one family of grandchildren said that she (their grandmother) wanted to wear long white socks like them, not the traditional strangely two-toed ceremonial socks. 

It seems to me so much better than the western secretive way, where an undertaker does all that weird stuff like replacing the person's fluids, all alone in a little cold mortuary-type place.  To have it all out in the open, to have all that time to think on that person, to bathe him or her with water, to cry the tears of grief together and alone, seems wonderful, human.

Needless to say, we were both a bit sniffy by the end of it.  Although Tim always blames allergies.

This is a quick drawing of Tim watching the movie, in his inimitable pose, arms above his head, his fingers fiddling with themselves.