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.