Memory and memorials

Sunrise this morning

The nights are getting longer here in Portugal, and we have had quite a bit of rain, which is not the cold endless rain of England, but wondrous and welcome and leaves shiny puddles for us on our daily walks, and tiny spears of grass happily leaping up everywhere, and beauteous clouds!

Being close to soixante-dix (70) I kind of watch my memory, and find, like Billy Collins in his wonderful poem Forgetfulness  , that there are things that slip away, that hide in some corner of the databank of my brain, only to pop out unexpectedly when I'm lying in the bath late at night.  

(Soixante-dix is french for 70.  In our Portuguese classes we are learning numbers, and like English and Afrikaans and Spanish, the other languages I know, Portuguese numbers follow a pattern: cinquenta, sessenta, setenta,  ... (fifty, sixy, seventy etc..  But French is so strange, they make you do calculations for some obtuse reason.  So 70 is sixty + ten, and it gets even weirder, because 80 is quatre-vingt!  Four times twenty!  And ninety is quatre-vingt-dix!  Four times twenty plus ten!  And it gets even worse but I won't go on.  Apparently it is based on the vigesimal or base-20 system used by both the Mayans and the Celts.  Like four-score in ancient texts? )

Information Age

Most of us are probably ADD nowadays, due to the constant technological bombardment, especially by the little computers we carry around in our pockets messing with our brains, so forgetting things is fairly normal, but I do find words not coming to me when I want them to quite frustrating.  

Pregnant with the twins

I think it all began during my first pregnancy at 23, and there is substantial evidence that pregnancy and motherhood affect our brains because of a variety of elevated hormones in pregnancy, and little sleep for years after.   ( I LOVE sleeping for 8 or 9 hours every night now!)

The years of being a student before I had my first child is a time bathed in sparkling light, my own Belle Epoque, when I was drunk on knowledge, philosophy, language.  And my clever mind could memorize poetry and remember vast tracts of books and images in order to write copiously from my memory for numerous 3-hour exams, quite easily and well.  

Emma aged 1.

When Emma was a year old I went back to university to finish my post-graduate teacher's diploma and really struggled with studying and exams.  It was like hitting an unanticipated brick wall at times during those last six months.  

Our lives consist of epochs, and generally we stumble from one to the next, mostly unaware how our lives will change but taking the grand leap into each epoch with faith in the NEXT THING.  How else to explain all the strange things we do as intelligent animals?  

Having my children was a different kind of golden, and each epoch has momentous events.  I'm in the autumn or winter epoch right now, which is so strange how suddenly it comes upon you.  

And memories are like that too, I think.  We have sunny memories of happy endless days, ecstatic blue-skied moments, and charred memories of terrible hours, agonising seconds that stretch forever, hurtful times.  We can somewhat choose which happy things we remember, but the sad or hurtful or terrible things seem to stay stuck fast in some room of our minds forever.  

The other morning Emma sent me a video that had popped up on her phone courtesy of Google, of the little granddaughters singing Happy Birthday to a cousin, when their speech was still quite newly fashioned.  It is only really nine or so years ago, but time is a funny thing.  We both had ready tears watching the sweetness of those little characters, who are now gawky tweens.  

Little Jess on my lap

Children grow so fast in adult time, and although mine are all most definitely adults, their little gossamer-haired heads, their perfect features and their cuddly bodies climbing on to my lap are still perfectly real in recollection.  

I never want to forget those memories.  I want to die before I don't know my loved ones.  

My mother and grandmother were exceptional ordinary women.  As most of us are.  Women do so much in history but are mostly not memorialised with statues or days or streets named after them.  So many men became famous because they had all the time and space in the world to themselves, they didn't have to be bothered with all the washing and childcaring and ironing and cleaning and making and cooking and all those other present participles which women are still doing every day.  

Before good contraceptives, and still sadly in much of the world of today, women just fell or plummeted into this role of primary carer/cook/washerwoman etc. just because they had sex, voluntarily or in-.  And their lives as creatives, their potential for study, for future professions, just came to an end.  

Granny Gracie with her two
small daughters, Joan and Nora.

An article in the newspaper about
the first women in the WRAF. 
Grace Hewitson was my
grandmother.

My British grandmother went to Art School in the early 20th century, I have her portfolio, such exquisite draftmanship and painting ability.  She played the violin, was one of the first Royal Airforce women to work in signals at Suttons Farm Airfield during the First World War in England, was well-educated and beloved of her siblings, her father, an esteemed major in the Army, and her spirited mother.  A South African RAF (Royal Air Force) pilot on leave during the war was invited to her parents' house, quickly proposed marriage, and soon after the end of the war, off she went to South Africa, where she immediately had two daughters, longed for her mother and siblings, never played the violin again, never drew another line. 
 

My gorgeous mother with Timmy

My mother Joan, Gracie's eldest daughter, married an RAF mechanic whom she met when his torpedoed ship was diverted to Cape Town during the Second World War, and then Joan promptly had a daughter herself, and then miscarriages until a son, and then accidentally, years later, me.

My mother with all of us.

She was incredibly intelligent and mathematically sharp, helped my dad study, teaching him maths, gettin him through all his exams to become an electrician and then a refrigeration and airconditioning engineer.  

When I went off to school she found a job at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, working for the professor of Pathology.  He discovered her profound intelligence and empathy and enquired about putting her forward for a scholarship  to study medicine!  But it was rejected because she was too old, the board who decided such things thought it would be a waste.  She was 39!  

I remember my granny, she was a small woman with delicate hands, the best giggle, who spent a lot of her life in pain, but who was always interested in us and loved us.  I loved her.  

I remember my mother.  She still lives inside me.  She was a large beautiful complicated woman with a huge heart who spent much of her later life in pain, but always loved greatly, her children, her friends, all her relatives, and also clouds in a field, seagulls, England.  I still love her.  I still miss her grand encompassing love.  

Great-grandmother Nora

But I don't know my great-grandmother, except that her name was Nora and she looks rather lovely and serious in old sepia pictures, and I know she was most likely a good mother because her three surviving children were allowed to become themselves.  

Plaque at St Stephen's Garden of Remembrance.

So there is a brick in the garden of remembrance at the little church in Pinelands (the same one where I rejected god as a small child).  My sister arranged for it to made and engraved and installed,  remembering our parents.  But that is my mother's only memorial, and she is mentioned under my dad, and in 50 or so years no one will know who she was.

We are these beings, these vivacious spirits, with all our magnificent feelings and passionate experiences, our desperate challenges and substantial successes, our writings, our photos, our paintings, our many many meals made and dishes washed up, the scraped knees bandaged, the hurt child restored, the manifold makings of the enormous landscape that is a life.  

And all this will be gone and unremembered, along with the majority of people who have lived on this earth.  And maybe this is as it should be, millions of lives lived well or poorly, over and forgotten, generation after generation, after all we are just animals like hummingbirds, elephants, fruitflies.  

But I will light a candle tonight for all my women ancestors, known and unknown, a small memorial.   

Georgia!

And here is a large charcoal drawing after Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers.  She was also a "badass", as one of my sons once noted after walking enchanted through an exhibition of her long prolific life. 

She made a whole lot of charcoal drawings which I had not seen before, and although I am not so fond of charcoal, I did enjoy the messy-handed drawings I made this week.

Old friends and Growing up

Our friends, in Portimão

Four days with friends staying, wonderful!  From Australia, but both belong to that vast diaspora of South Africans, the Scatterlings of Africa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiWnHmmRIm8 .  Rob grew up with Tim, as he is the younger brother of Tim's best friend.  Rob and Eurika showed us such hospitality in their beautiful house in Sydney when we visited them in Australia in 2016, and it was wonderful to reciprocate at last!  

Two men on the beach

It is quite seldom as a couple that you find another pair where all four people get on extremely well.  These two make up one of those couples.  So there was walking, and a boat trip, and swimming in the sea (by the women while the men sat under an umbrella), and delicious meals, and shared conversations of varied profundity and hilarity.   

From the boat

Tim and Rob reminisced about people and events, family members and church congregants.  All the everyday things that happen to us through the years of childhood, and these are the ones which we paste into our memories, remembered for a variety of reasons: a kind teacher, a mean girl, a storm during a church picnic, your first crush.  All part of the moving pictures in our heads.  All seen slightly differently, but recollected clearly.  All so long ago now.  But still luminous.  

Tim and Rob spoke a lot about their schooldays and the different characters of the teachers, and the cuts (whippings) that the boys got then, just for failing tests even.  I thought about how many cuts I would have received if I had been a boy!  

My brother and I, long before the letter
that changed my life

When I was about 14 or 15, I decided I had had enough of school.  My brother, who had already moved to England, was the one who wrote me a passionate letter about the importance of EDUCATION, and managed to change my mind about leaving after grade 10.

But grade 11 was hard for me.  I didn't fit in at all.  I went to a strict academic school for girls which spewed out the indoctrinating Christian National Education of the repressive regime of South Africa in the 60's and 70's.  I was too nonconformist for that milieu.  I questioned everything, I was no good at sport (another prerequisite to success), and I didn't believe in god.  I believed in reading, in trees, in Art, in classical music, in sex, in the beach, in love, in poetry, in passion.   (I still believe in all these things.) 

So to save my sanity I began bunking (playing hooky from) school.  Many days, I would ride my bike to school, and I wouldn't even enter the building.  I would just park my bike, walk on down the path at the back of the school which went past the hockey fields and swimming pool, to the subway under the railway, where I would catch a ride on a train somewhere.  It didn't matter where, the beach was one way and the city was the other.  

Cape Town Symphony Orchestra

Most Thursdays would find me sitting in the City Hall watching the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra at their weekly practice.  

Or I would walk up through Adderly Street to the Public Gardens and feed peanuts to the squirrels, having bought an avocado or two from the vendors to eat as my lunch.  I might just spend an hour or so reading on a bench there, surrounded by happy squirrels and pigeons.  (I frequently stole books, falling in love with their covers and the wondrous story that would take me away.  My dad gave me pocket money which bought four books a month, but it was never enough.)

Cape Town company Gardens

Sometimes I went to the Monte Carlo movie theatre, which always had the earliest matinees, and I would sit in the enchanted dark and watch movies. I was put off that though, for there were too many lonely creeps sidling up to this schoolgirl in her uniform and doing stuff with their crotches, so often I had to leave hurriedly and miss the rest of the story.  

I was utterly convinced that no one would notice at school, I thought they would be happy that my rude presence was gone, but of course after some time a teacher would report too many absences and I would be called in to the principal.  She was a tall authoritative woman and I was scared of her.  I really would try then, after her stern warnings, but a few weeks later the wanderlust would grab me and off I would go again. 

In grade 12 my parents were called in and I was threatened with expulsion.  My poor embarrassed mum and dad managed to persuade the principal to give me another chance, but there were three or four of these meetings before I realised my days of freedom were over. If I didn't stop walking out of school I wouldn't get my Matric certificate.  I wouldn't be able to go to university where I could do all the wonderful things I wanted to every day: Paint, Have Sex, Read, Write, Paint etc..  

I wonder if I would have been as brave and determined if I had got a hiding every time I was caught?  

But I am convinced that this was my education.  All children really educate themselves, depending on what they are interested in, what grabs their fancy.  It's why we choose certain subjects to concentrate on, and go all out doing extra work on them, not just what is given by a teacher.  

I educated myself while absconding from school.  I learned independence (like how to make maps of a city in your head, how to ride a train without paying, how to get away from lecherous men, how to steal books {I only stole about 20 books in my life, and never anything else},), I learned everything from books, (the words used for body-parts we never mention, how trees grow to a great age, how the little black letters on a page could show me how someone else had felt the exact same way as I was feeling, more than two hundred years ago).  

I learned to live with my own thoughts, I learned to be alone but not lonely.  I was passionate about Art and Literature and Poetry and could fill all my waking hours happily and productively.  

I was so lucky not to live with the threat of caning.  

I was so lucky not to have the technology of today.

Frontispiece of a book my mother gave
me a few years before she died.

When I apologized to my parents many years later, my mother professed to not remember anything about the fact that I had been such an awful teenager, that she had spent anxious hours wondering when I was coming home, where I was, if I was pregnant, if I would ever make anything of myself.  

She told me instead that I had always been her wonderful daughter!  That she adored me.  Which, I suppose, is all you want from a mother.  Someone who lets you become yourself, knowing you are loved abundantly, always.  

A little study of imaginary plants for today.

Leaves

Friends and bullies

 When you are little it is so much easier to make friends (well more or less everything is easier when you are a small child), you just meet someone randomly and say, "Do you want to come and play at my house?" and then you become firm friends very easily and quickly.  Or you don't see each other for a while and you drift apart but don't feel desperately sad about it. 

A picture I did for Trish from a 
photo of us sharing a towel on
Dalebrook beach in Cape Town

My first friend was Trish, and we met when we were both one-year olds.  Our mothers became friends even though there was a nine-year age-gap between them, and I just loved my friend's entire chaotic family of, eventually, six children!  Her mum became my second mother, just as so many of us become mothering figures to our childrens' friends.  We two were beloved best friends, even though we were quite different, in looks and in our natures.  We used to tell everyone we were twins although it was patently obvious that we weren't even related!  

My friend Maureen, a small woman still filled with
the huge life and vivacity seen in this image from
years ago. She is now 80 (!) and lives in Fremantle.

I have had several such deep and profound friendships through my life, some which have lasted most of my life.  It is a great sadness to me that each of my very dear friends now lives far away, in South Africa, in Zimbabwe, in Australia, in America.  

When we moved to America we left our entire history, from birth to mid-forties, such a jolt to the psyche!  

It took ages to make friends and most of them turned out to be South African, no doubt due to that shared history, that humour, that consciousness, those perceptions distributed only amongst your own countrymen and women.  

Now we have uprooted ourselves once more, and so we lose our American history of 21 years. As even older people it is that much harder to make new friends.  Neither Tim nor I are much good at small talk and we're both a little eccentric and different.  We are both the third child in our families, and we're putting it down to that!  Also, I am even more passionate about those things which outrage me than I was as a younger environmentalist/feminist/pacifist etcist.  This tends to put people off.   

Last year on our travels we stayed for a weekend with an old church friend of Tim's from long ago, who came to Portugal and married an advocate here.  They were astonished that I don't eat meat, as most people in Portugal are astonished.  (You can buy whole entire rabbits at the meat counter here!) Eventually, after several meals, and my refusal to eat even octopus, they asked me why.  So I explained, to the best of my ability, about the cruelty of factory farms and abattoirs and how animals are all sentient beings, with emotions and social structures and whatnot.  That scientists are discovering that the question to ask is not, "Which animals have emotions?" but "Do any creatures not have emotions?" 

And I told them about the book I read about a Giant Pacific Octopus in the New England Aquarium, The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery, a beautiful study.  She speaks of a friendship between the author and an octopus named Athena, but the book also includes scientific knowledge of what is being learned about octopuses, and it makes us wonder about these magical creatures.  As humans we always look at everything from our own perspectives, our own intelligences, but it seems that even octopuses have their rich intelligence and abstract thought and even a sense of humour, and other strange and extraordinary powers, like the ability to pour their entire bodies into a bottle.  They are truly admirable, beautiful aliens.  

And not for eating.  

And then I spoiled it all by weeping. 

Wonderfully, and in spite of my sentiments for animals, these two have become very good friends of ours, and we love them.  They are kind and lovely people, we just feel differently about meat.     

And, the opposite of friends, 

are BULLIES.

Bullies are on my mind now because of two of my grandchildren starting high school.  Smartphones and social media have made bullying so much worse, as children can exclude others from whatsapp groups, badmouth them online with no reprisals, and a multitude of other sins.  The last few years of my teaching, several of my students were on anti-depressants already, at the tender ages of 15 and 16, and largely, I believe, due to all this kind of stuff, plus the enormous weight of information which bears down on us every day.  

The reader, having a birthday.

So many of us are bullied, and the bullying stays with us our entire lives.  I remember well my own first experience of it, when I was 6.  My best friend and I went to "Big" school the same day and we were happily ensconced together in our little wooden desks, when suddenly, on the second or third day of school, I was whisked away to demonstrate my reading abilities to a group of other teachers, and then to the very intimidating headmistress,  One of the teachers asked me when I learned to read and I replied, "I was born like that." at which they all unexpectedly roared with laughter.  To me it felt like I had always read, as my dad had taught me when I was very little.  And a solitary child with a chronic illness finds great solace in reading for hours and hours, so that she can forget her lungs' labouring breaths and travel far far away with her mind.    

Then just as suddenly I was pushed into another classroom a year above, where I had to read aloud, a lot.  I read to the class while the teacher marked books and prepared lessons, standing on a little stool so that everyone could see me, as I was very small.  Apparently they were amazed that I read so expressively and that I did all the voices. (Maybe that's why I became a teacher.)

When break-time came, we all went outside to eat our packed sandwiches sitting on the grass under the trees, and I went eagerly to find my friend, who was sitting in a circle of little girls all sitting cross-legged, who, when they saw me, the little freak who could already read and was moved up a class, all hurriedly scrunched up until their knees were touching so that there would be no space for me to fit in.  I walked slowly around the entire circle of about 7 or 8 children, and no one moved up to let me in,  So I just walked away.  I was utterly shocked and my heart hurt. 

And still does, to this day.  I was treated as a misfit and so eventually that is what I became.  But while I was becoming myself, I became strong, grew a (slightly) thicker skin, learned that ignoring someone mostly works, found my own different friends.  I wore strange clothes I made myself, went down my own path of poetry and art and stories and the green world of nature.  I was always happy in my own company.

I have heard other people's stories of being bullied, horrendous stories, where mine pale in comparison.  Boys getting stripped down and made to stand while everyone laughs at their genitals, an entire class voting against a child for some made-up issue, horrible physical and mental abuse.  

Margaret Atwood wrote about her childhood trauma in her brilliant book Cat's Eye, where a 'mean girl' bully nearly caused her death.   

The girl who was bullied just tried to deal with it all on her own, only told her mother when the near-death occurred.  It is interesting that, although I am 15 years younger than Margaret Atwood and grew up on a different continent entirely, my generation also just dealt with awful experiences.  Bad things happened to us and we just stoically carried on, we didn't tell our parents or complain to anyone, we just learned how to cope with the trauma.   

You can become quite cynical about human beings, can't you?  

The beautiful seascape

But yesterday we went to an art exhibition in Portimão, and there was beauty and colour and passion and creativity, and a lot of people looking at pictures, and an old artist told us his entire life story, just about, all in Spanish, as he was from Toledo, and had traveled down slowly to Portimão, over many days, in his van.  He is a passionate painter of Nature, and we walked away from his stall with a beautiful little seascape which will now become part of our Sea wall.  

Our Sea wall.

Self-portrait with shadows

And a watercolour self-portrait this week, with leaf-shadows added in Procreate on the Ipad.  I read a lovely description of self-portraits today, which I quote here from a critic writing about the winner of the second biennial Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize in 2013.  "Newbolt demonstrates how self-portraiture offers an opportunity for the artist to present their image as they know themselves - a platform for the individual to explore the potent, confusing, relationship between psyche and body."

Fires and Languages

We were due to go north to Porto and beyond for Tim to hike 3 days of the Camino de Santiago with our friend Bruce, who is hiking the trail in honour of his wife who died recently of Alzheimer's. But suddenly there were fires everywhere near the route, and our trip was postponed until Tim went up a day late while I stayed behind, as my lungs are rather terrified of smoke. 

The fire triangle.

Meteorologists talk of the fire triangle, which looks like this.

There's also a rule of thirties which seems to predicate wildfires: above 30C temperature, below 30% humidity, 30km per hour winds, and 30 days without rain.

In Portugal, as elsewhere, many of the fires are set by arsonists, which is as incomprehensible to me as the fact that the criminal Trump is running again for President, and that half the population of America support this insanity.

At various times during the days before he left, Tim and I were glued to the Portuguese CNN, which had constant updates on the FOGOS.  We struggled with the language of the reporters and the rolling headlines, a language which we have just begun learning.  Sometimes we would race to the translation app, trying to find meaning before the headline scrolled to something just as incomprehensible.  Pictures always help for context of course, and we could see that the fires were awful and that everyone was trying to help, brave men and women trying desperately to save their homes with green-leaved branches, using green vegetation to beat away at the burning vegetation, all that heat and the smoke with no protection for their bodies or their lungs.  

example of small creature
affected by the fires

The fires are under control now and mostly out, although there is still smoke in the air, a little, where Tim is walking today.  I always consider all the little wild creatures affected, and feel so sad with my sentimental heart.  It is strange that 'sentimental' has a bad rap.  In spanish, sentimiento means feeling, or sorrow, and sentimento, as in sentimento de compasión, is a sense of compassion.

Another example

In Europe most people speak 2 or 3 languages.  As a generalization, many English people tend to rest on the laurels of English, believing they can get by. I do feel incredibly lucky to have had English as my native language. It is an extremely beautiful and expressive language, perhaps due to its large number of words, by some counts more than any other language.  Be that as it may, I am utterly in love with English, with the poetry of it, the familiarity of its sounds, it is as dear to me as the country of my heart.  At the International School of Boston where I taught for 17 years, I had an amazing passionate South American student who was bilingual in Spanish (her mother-tongue) and French, and fluent in English too.  Laura was a wonderful poet, and after two years of study with us, she began writing all her poetry in English, and when I asked her why she said, "Because it is the most beautiful language in the world!"

My introduction to other languages came when we were forced to learn Afrikaans from the age of 7 or 8, and I absolutely loathed it.  Even though I am a fifth-generation South African on my mother's side, still, the descendants of an 1840 British immigrant called John Webster clung stubbornly to the age-old hatred between the 'British' and the 'Boer'.  When I was little, the Afrikaners created the repressive state of Apartheid which set our country on a long trajectory of hatred and brutality and poverty, the effects of which are still extensive in the now democratic South Africa of 2024.  So there was also that going against Afrikaans as a language.

However, at the beginning of grade 10, I was fifteen years old, a budding poet and romantic. In walked this new, extremely large and rather beautiful Afrikaans teacher.  She kind of floated in, in that graceful manner which some very large women have.  She had bare arms and beautiful skin, and she graciously put her pile of books down, then swept around to face us all (I was in the back corner of the classroom, where the wicked students were always seated) and began reciting a poem.  An Afrikaans poem! Die Dans van die Reën by Eugène Marais.  My heart!  

Die Dans van die Reën (The Dance of the Rain) is a poem personifying the rain as a woman and how the

an old drawing of mine which sort
of captures the feeling of the poem

parched land feels when the rain finally falls.  Utterly beautiful and somehow untranslatable into English.  But you can read the original with a translation here: https://www.wattpad.com/8161821-gecko-jig-the-dance-of-the-rain-die-dans-van-die   That lesson was like being in an auditorium witnessing the most enthralling performance!  During those 40 minutes I fell in love with Afrikaans and never looked back!  No Afrikaans teacher had thought to teach us poetry before!  Or maybe I just hadn't been listening.

And then you find all the other attributes of the language, the humour, the perfect onomatopaeic words, the vulgar disgust of Afrikaans swear words, wonderful.

In grade 7 we had to choose Latin or French for High School, although there was only one French class and two teaching Latin.  So someone told us to say "I want to be a diplomat" to get into the French class.  I wonder how many of those french students ever became diplomats!  The teacher was a crazy old frenchwoman, Madame Doise, who taught us lots of old french folk songs and nursery rhymes, which are all still preserved in my brain and come rushing out at odd moments, word-perfect.  

In grade 11, my friend and I decided we wanted to be really good at French and knew Madame Doise was not doing it for us, so we persuaded our parents to pay for extra French classes with a private teacher.  This went along swimmingly until the old husband, who I thought was very dear and had become my friend, started coming on to me, quite aggressively, which put an end to that!

During lockdown Tim and I started learning Spanish with a wonderful Peruvian teacher, who happened to be the hero girlfriend who saved our son when he nearly died from Covid in Argentina at the beginning of the pandemic.   When they sadly broke up two years later we took lessons with Matthew's original Spanish teacher in Guatemala, Elsa, an extraordinary young woman who became our dear friend.  We spent a few days in Guetemala with her last year but now, since we have had to give up our lessons because of learning Portuguese, I miss her terribly.

Flowering.

All these languages in the little section of my brain labeled FOREIGN LANGUAGES vie for my attention when I am trying to speak just one of them.  Although I am really good at reading and understanding and also writing in all these languages, I can't say I am fluent in speaking them.  It seems that is always the hardest part of learning a language.  Afrikaans comes easiest to me and Tim and I use it often as a "secret language".  Sometimes when I have thought I was having a wonderful conversation in French, the person will suddenly look at me oddly and I come to realise that Afrikaans has won that round in the FOREIGN LANGUAGES boxing ring.  

But I love them, all these arguing tongues, I find them fascinating and confusing and beautiful and startling and astonishing, and they have opened my mind to a compelling maze of cultures and histories that I would never have ventured down.

And the art for the week is a reworking of an old self-portrait, I have been loving collage this week!

Tests and portraits

As I get older I notice that when older people get together, they often bring up their medical issues, their aches and pains, their recent operations.  I myself loathe talking about such things with strangers, and hate hospitals and being sick with a grand passion.  (I know, everybody probably feels the same way about being sick and hospitals.)

But of course, getting older means that things do begin failing and changing, and I am talking about this now only to illustrate kindness in this, my newly adopted country, Portugal.  

My grandpa smoking a pipe with his boy,
my incredibly young dad, sporting very
funny hair. 

I have been a pretty constant and unwilling visitor to doctor's offices and hospitals all my life, because I inherited my grandfather's lungs, which were thought to have become problematic after being mustard-gassed in the trenches of the Somme during the "great war".  But I think they were probably pretty bad to begin with and his lung problems were exacerbated by the gassing.  This kind of asthma seems genetic, as several of my family members of three generations suffer from asthma, some being worse-off than others. 

A painting I did of Childhood. 
Notice the lungs/elephant ears.

When I was a little girl there were no great medical solutions for my illness, so with flu and exercise-induced asthma, I spent quite a large amount of my young life struggling for breath, and quite often our irritable doctor, who also happened to be my godmother, would at last give me what seemed always to be the last option, an injection (what it was I still haven't been able to find out), which  basically knocked me out like an anaesthetic.  

How it felt. (ipad drawing)

I suppose the reasoning was that if your entire body is relaxed, those little airways would also relax, enabling the breath.  They were the strangest experiences though, because it was like being thrown down a black hole, from which I would slowly rise up, hours and hours later.  I would dazedly walk through to the toilet from my room, and after doing the longest wee ever, would gaze into the mirror above the bathroom sink for ages, examining my face.  Was this the same Anne Radford that I knew? And if not, who was I?  How could I find myself again?  

In 1990 someone invented inhaled corticosteroids, which changed my life (also that of my younger daughter who sadly inherited those damn lungs as well).  

Anyway, since 2020 I have had a pulmonologist checking up on me so I had to find a Portuguese pulmonologist, who ordered tests.  

For the Pulmonary Lung Function test, you have to sit in a kind of clear airtight box with clips on your nose and perform various breathing exercises, which involve various kinds of torture for an asthmatic - like having to wheeze out all your breath from lungs which have no more breath left long before the technician gives the signal to breath in again.  Before which point you come to believe that you are about to faint, start seeing the blackness behind your eyes, and, after the third attempt, go into full-blown panic!  

Upon which, the incredibly sweet Filipa comes to your rescue, opens the horrible claustrophobic door and leads you out into the light, walks you around, tells you you're fine, puts her arm around your shoulder and gives you all her strength.  

When you go back in, you know she is with you, she maintains eye contact the entire time, she talks with her low sweet Portuguese-accented words, tells you she is with you, but that it is you who are strong, you who can do it, push that air all out, all out, you can do it, it's you! .....  Okay breathe in!

And I did, and I could!  

When it was done, she took me out of the box and gave me a huge hug. She was tall, like a friendly tree, and my head fitted on her shoulder, and I cried a little from all her humanity.  

The kindness of strangers was something which decided us on this new country of ours, and this is just one example of so many experiences we have had.  

Ella and the dove

Recently I have been loving making block-prints, which were always such a surprising delight for my students at the International School.  In fact, most people remember doing lino-prints at school, I think it is a stand-out memory of school art.  The mirror image of what you have drawn and carved out, and the myriad ways you can print.  Magic.  

I made a block of my granddaughter Ella who is a dreamy book-loving child, so I chose a mourning dove to sit with her, because they are symbols of peace and loyalty, and are also very pragmatic birds, as is she (pragmatic, not a bird.)  [Fun fact about doves which has nothing to do with Ella, is that they are rare among birds as they can suck up water using their beaks like a straw, unlike other birds which have to tilt their heads back to drink.]

Luna and the magpie

Then I made one of Luna, using a magpie as her bird, as they are curious about everything, and talk and sing a lot!  Luna is all those things too!

I had to carve out the cheeks and foreheads very deeply so that no ink could seep in there, because both girls are 11 with those still-perfect faces.  

After Luna, I decided to do a self-portrait, because although I have done about a hundred self-portraits over the years, I have never done a block-print one.  I didn't have to carve out deeply, because at 69 my face is filled with laughter-lines and worry-wrinkles and sun-spots and just all the usual ways in which skin shows its age.

Me with red hair

I chose a hoopoe (a name which has always evoked laughter amongst the youngest in our family and even more for its binomial name Upupa epops africana) as my bird, because they are a lovely henna sienna-brown, which my hair was for the majority of my adult life. 

Anne and the hoopoe

A version of this bird lives in Portugal, the Eurasian hoopoe, but I first met them when I was a child, as they are South African birds too, and my heart will always be with that country, which built my bones, which made my fragile, tough, caring, brave, sensitive, passionate soul.

How to mark my 70th year on earth?

The end of a beautiful birthday day!

Nine days ago, Ten days ago, no, Eleven days ago I turned 69. (I have begun this several times.) As my dad always loved to explain, I have now entered the next number year, my actual 70th year on earth! So I would like to mark this momentous year in some way. It began with celebrating with 3 of my 4 children, and 2 of my 4 grandchildren, which was amazing and hasn't happened for many years.

A couple of days ago Tim and I wrote down our goals for the next year. I am old enough to have enough experience of goal-setting to realise that you should set yourself smaller goals, achievable goals, so that you don't constantly sell yourself short, feel guilty and give up. 

 

My blog became 3 books!

I am no stranger to long-term goals, some achieved, many not. Yet. 

 In 2010 I kept a blogpost going for 365 days, a journal of learning to run in my beloved meadow (lifelong asthmatic) and a sort of self-portrait every day. I achieved that one, which was called Two Resolutions.

Beautiful architecture in Valencia

When we went traveling for 18 months in 2022 and 23, after selling our house in Massachusetts, I wrote a blog weekly, until its links on Tim's Facebook and my Instagram were shut down by a complaint. After this sad event, I still kept my usual diary, but no blog. Until now. I hope it doesn't get shut down again. I am not sure what I said, except that maybe someone objected to my telling of a moment of anger and disappointment in Spain because all the most beautiful buildings were originally built for the glory of god. (And yes, I am an anti-religious person, believing religion responsible for so much evil in the world: wars, violence against women, degradation of the environment etc.) 

Art from this week: Tree of life block-print

So, my new Two Resolutions are: To write a once-a-week blog, a sort of memoir, and to include my best art from that week. 

 I want to write this story because there are fewer years in front of me than behind me, and my life has been an interesting life, a big little life.  My own life, like no one else's.  I have lived such a lucky life, in reality. I have had my share of delight and grief, the same as anyone you get to know. I have felt myself unlucky many times, but with the broader viewpoint of older age, have realised there has probably been much more luck than unluck. Even though I live my life in a state of permanent potential outrage, being a conscious humanbeingwoman living in the 21st century, I still know and count my blessings. (And no, God didn't give them to me, you can just be blessed. Full stop.) 

 So here we go, with my earliest memory, for the memoir part. Our driveway had a wrought-iron gate on to the street, and I, being a curious almost-3-year-old, thought I could see better up and down the road if I stuck my head through the bars. When I grew tired of looking, I found I couldn't pull my head back out through the bars! After wriggling around for a while in this head-jail, I started to screech and stopped some cars, whose drivers came over to see if they could help. (This was a long time ago and small children played unsupervised much of the time.) My dad heard the screeching and the commotion from the now small crowd of helpful passers-by, and came over to resolve the problem, which he was generally good at. I think it was vaseline which finally did the trick of freeing me, although I believed for years the story my big brother told that my dad had just wrenched the bars apart with his brute strength.

Me and my dad.

That fits better with my childlike view of my dad as superman. My dad had enormous hands, I've never seen their like, and he could do such gentle things with them, like fix broken birds and other creatures I brought home when I was a little older.

My dad's hands, fixing a broken bird I brought home.

I can safely say that my life has progressed in a similar pattern to that wayward, inquisitive little girl's first remembered experience.

Rights and Fights and Beauty

 Tim, as most people who know him will agree, is a lovely man.  

Tim at our favourite restaurant

My friend MaureenInAustralia, (who, 43 years ago, astonishingly jumped into the car where I was breastfeeding my first baby and told me that although she was nine years older than me we could still be best friends) calls my husband "the-nicest-man-in-the-world".  She sends us Christmas cards addressed to "Dearest Anne and Tim-the-nicest-man-in-the-world, ...".   

Our four children adore Tim and see him as "the rock", "the voice of reason", "calm in the storm" etc. 

I think I am the storm.  

One of the traits of a calm man is that he avoids confrontation, and even if drawn into it, remains calm and rational. 

I, however, fly into the face of the hurricane, all my swords drawn, dragon-fires blazing.  I have been enraged by injustice, cruelty, stupidity my entire life.   

Me and my dragon

In Lagos we stayed in a ground-floor AirBnB in a large ugly apartment block.  It was fairly empty as I think many of the apartments are rented out only in the summer months.  I did the washing one day and then carefully pegged it all onto the clothes-horse provided, and put it out on the pavement right in front of our balcony, in the sun.  As I was putting the final pegs on, I became aware that the strange shouting going on across the parking lot was an old French man raging at me!  "Non! Non!  It is forbidden!  No washing!"  

I was immediately shocked and infuriated. "Mon dieu but why?"  So I got Tim to help me lift the entire caboodle back over the wall of the balcony, during which we both managed to get our arms painfully scissored by the stupid clothes-horse.  

Next minute Tim was horrified to observe me marching purposefully across the parking lot, previously mentioned swords drawn, dragon-fires blazing.  

At the gate there was suddenly a beautiful young Adonis, wearing only a pair of shorts.  He greeted me in French and asked if he could help me, and even though I could have spoken his language, I needed my own, my emotional lexicon, for what I had to say!  I told him an angry old french man had shouted at me and he said, with a remorseful shrug of his shoulders, "Ah, that is my father."  

His cross-faced mother appeared around the balcony wall, and he acted as the go-between, even though we were all speaking English and could all hear one another perfectly. 

Me: "I just want to know what difference it will make to your father if I put my clothes out, way across the parking lot, in the sun, for a couple of hours, to dry them?"

Adonis: "She just wants to know why she can't put her washing?"

Cross-faced mother: "Because it is not beautiful!  We all live here!  It is not beautiful!"

Me: "Really? Have you looked around this ugly apartment block recently?"  (I thought it actually)  

Adonis: "They live here and it is not beautiful to see your washing."

Me: (speechless)

Adonis: "Have you tried it on the roof?"

Me: (thinking "What?")

from the rooftop (quite ugly)

Adonis: "You should have a key for the roof and there is sun there for the washing.  I can help you?"

Me: (thinking "Yes, please.") "Ah thanks so much, that is great, I will try that!"  Turning away.

Adonis: "Have a beautiful day!"  

So the sword-wielding dragon-rider found the solution!  Tim and I found the rooftop (I LOVE rooftops, azoteas in Mexico City), with the sun, and a 360° view, and everything turned out alright!  (And the washing dried.)  

"Have a beautiful day!" Indeed.

And Beauty, like Keats emphasized.  It is everywhere here in the natural world.

Happiness - Bodyboarding at Bordeira

Yesterday in beautiful tiny Carrapateira, after the best bodyboarding afternoon on Bordeira beach, I walked home over the dunes, which takes me about 45 minutes.  Tim pointed out that it should take 10 to 15 minutes but that I stop for every interesting thing, like a little dung beetle doing its important work on the horse manure.  (Dung beetles are the only animals known to navigate by the Milky Way! A little beetle navigates by the stars?!  Isn't the natural world an incredible treasure?)

A dung beetle with his prize

Little plover on her nest

Also a Kentish plover I discovered on my ramblings.  I suddenly noticed the little rapid-legged runner hurrying off,  and so I went and hid just over the dune, and sure enough, she checked very carefully, running hither and thither (yes, lovely archaic words) and eventually doubling back, when she thought it was safe, to her little nest of eggs, a really idiotic depression in the sand.  (I guess these birds evolved to do this weird useless kind of nest before there were all these awful human predatory beings to disturb them with their big feet and their clumsy nosy dogs!)

Little Egret preening

And a wonderfully relaxed preening Little Egret (which is quite big actually), bright white and shining in the reed-bed, as well as a Grey Heron floating off like a pterodactyl over the marsh in the evening light.

Little ancient god(dess)

And to my delight, the other day I noticed this little god with his beautiful crown making his slow way across our front "garden" which is just stones. He had to climb right up the fence too, and I thought he must be a wingless Praying Mantis.  

(I have just found out that she is a little goddess and indeed has wings and can fly.  I don't know why she spent so long walking and climbing in her wavery fashion. She is a Conehead Mantis and her antennae mark her as female.  They are plain and short, not feathery and long like that of the male.) 

Coastal beauty with Tim-the-nicest-man-in-the-world

I want to live near this coast always.  It is magnificent.   Wild cliffs, dunes, little bays with perfect waves, deep blue and turquoise ocean.  Big sky.  Not many people.  Perfect.