55

Written while crossing the wide blue Atlantic.

A sad/happy day because while I am leaving my little UK family, I am traveling back to our adopted country where my husband is waiting for me, and we will see each other through the glass doors and smile and our bodies will meet one another, again. When we all lived in the magical 16 Cross Street in South Africa, we could never have dreamed that one day we would be spread all over the globe.  One daughter lives in the "green and pleasant land", this little island which once ruled the world.  Another daughter resides in beauteous Cape Town, the place where I was born and raised, near the southern-most tip of Africa.  One son is studying in sunny Senegal, at the western-most point of Africa, in Dakar.  And the other son is stuck in snow-laden Boston in America, where, a little way north, our house creaks under the burden of this winter's record snowfall. 

We have spent the last thirteen years leaving people we love, or saying goodbye to a beloved person who is leaving.  I am so tired of it.  I hate airports with a passion.  I am green with jealousy when I see the mother of Emma's friend, who lives just around the corner from her daughter, who looks after her little grandson a couple of days a week and babysits him at night when his parents want a night out.  Her house is equipped with a high chair and a cot for the little lad, and his face lights up with pleasure when he sees his granny and grandad.  Such a perfect arrangement.

We were sitting at the airport having lunch when Emma remarked how sad she was and that we are always saying goodbye and then longing for the next time, which is not a great way to live your life.  So I replied that we all have our separate lives to lead, our everyday lives, and they are good, and filled with work and play and the usual mix of gladness and sorrows.  I pointed out that we don't live with our mothers forever anyway.  She smilingly responded that we should.  That Luna will always live with her.  We laughed and laughed, remembering our bond, how when Emma was a baby I wore her like a garment, and when she was about five she vowed that she would marry me when she was a grownup.

The last thing I always tell Luna (well, I've done it the three times I have said goodbye to her), is "Don't forget me, I'm your grandmother."  And so far she hasn't.  I told her that as I was leaving London when she was only six days old, and she gazed at me with those wise newborn eyes and listened, and remembered, because when Emma walked out on to the airport concourse with a four-month old Luna strapped to her front, the little thing took one look at me and gave me a beatific smile, starting with a crinkling of her eyes and spreading until her whole face beamed.  I reminded her again when she and Emma flew back to London five weeks later, and then, ten days ago, when I finally walked into the kitchen where her great-aunt was holding her, all miserable with chickenpox, I sang our little song to her and she recognised me and smiled her enchanting spotty-faced grin and came willingly into my joyful arms.

Missing my little Moon.

I look at the map on the tiny screen on the seat-back in front of me to see how far we have come, and there is the whole world fitting neatly into this little rectangle, with the important cities marked.  There is Cape Town at the bottom, and Dakar slightly west, and above them London, and then off to one side, Boston.  And it all looks so small and easy to deal with, betraying the eyes because the heart knows that the distances are vast, but also that that wonderful imaginary umbilicus stretches across oceans and on the wind to each of those places, beautiful and bright and shining.