66 on the 7th

You know those days when you are rushing to leave because you are almost late, and then something happens to make you definitely late?   Like you are just leaving, rush back to fill your water-bottle, and as you sweep past the counter the glass of water left there last night leaps off and smashes on the floor, so that there is now a large area of wet broken glass and a puddle to clean up.  And then you are finally on your way, and around the corner at Bothways Farm, the trees are dressed in the finest coats of lacy rime, glinting and glittering in the early morning light, and you are arrested in your car as it attempts to drive on past, and you stop and get out in the -13C air and try to capture this beauty.  And eventually you get back in the car, after several people have slowed and almost stopped to see if you are alright, crazy woman without hat nor gloves, and your hands are now screaming for warmth, and luckily around the next corner the heat finally comes on and your aching fingers unstiffen, the sun shines its best to try to warm you through the window, and the highway is kind, as it usually is on a Friday morning for some reason (does everyone work from home on a Friday?), and you reach your destination in perfect time.

 

Shining.

So just to bring me back to reality, to realise that my art room is not a magical kingdom where everyone has partaken of angel-dust, today I had a sixth-grader say something completely disgusting about another sixth-grader’s older sister, and it must have been pretty bad because no one would tell me what he had said, and the little brother was crying his eyes out on the other side of the table.  Why would a little kid say such a thing?  I remember Nicholas and Matthew, the new foreigners in sixth grade, similarly defending their sisters, who weren’t even in the same school, who the insulter had never even met!

And then in my other class these four little boys (over whom most of the girls tower) who are eleven and twelve years old, but honestly two of whom could pass for nine years old, were talking in a very disgusting way about pictures of naked women and making very rude gestures indeed.  I couldn’t understand everything they said because they were speaking low and in very rapid Parisian French, but I thought, “Why are you even talking like this, you barely have balls to speak of, you’re only 4 foot high, it's ridiculous!”

There must have been something in the air today, because even my older kids were being mean about people and had to be called out on it. 

It is the 7^th March, the wedding anniversary of my Mum and Dad.  They were married on the seventh because it was my mother’s lucky number.  (It is apparently the lucky number of many people, and the number 7 features prominently in all world religions and mythologies – a few examples out of hundreds: in Christianity, God took seven days to create the earth; in Islam, when you are a pilgrim to Mecca, you make seven circumambulations around the Kaaba. In Judaism, Shiv-a is another pronunciation of the number seven, hence one sits shiva for seven days.  Buddha walked seven steps when he was born, etc. etc.)    

Seventy-two years ago Joan and Jack were married in Sea Point, Cape Town, where my mother had grown up. Several months earlier my dad had come over on a troop-ship from England, a member of the RAF, and met my mother who was working as a WAF, handing out uniforms.  He fell in love with Joan, my mother, and with South Africa, and always maintained there was nowhere else where the sun warmed you “to your bones’.  

Mum and Dad on the beach in Cape Town - circa 1941

 

It is so strange to see images of your parents so happily in love, long before you were born, long before they became your parents, when they were young and beautiful and had few worries.  When you are a child you can’t even imagine such a thing, it is inconceivable that the world of your mum and dad did not always revolve around you. 

They were married for 64 years, a huge number, quite unusual in our world, and a good example of how hard you have to work at a marriage, how making a promise means keeping it for a very long time.  They had great ups and low downs, grand arguments and great joys, awful despondencies and happy reconciliations.  They had three children, ten grandchildren and three great-grandchildren in their lifetimes.  Now there are four more great-grandies, of which my little Luna and Ella are two!

Mum and Dad on the beach in Winthrop, Massachusetts, circa 2002

When my parents had been married for fifty-five years, I made them a wall-hanging, showing them standing in front of their beloved 10 Forest Drive, and there are their three children with their families, and of course it was not ready for the anniversary (yes Emma and Jess, you know me well – but what a lot of embroidery and sewing went into this wall-hanging), so it was finished by July of that year, when we went to Cape Town to deliver it, where it hung in pride of place in my parents' little lounge until they died.  I have it now, but, like their ashes, I still have no idea what to do with it.

Applique and embroidery wall-hanging for 55 years.

And so the tree grows new branches,still standing on firm roots, although the great trunk is composed only of spirits now, and new saplings are springing up all over the world.