Seizième

Rambled through the misty meadows with my ghost-dog Molly, about 2km.  It was so quiet in parts, as though the fog had dimmed sound as well as sight.  But my robins found me along the way, flashing their bright feathers at me, flitting quietly through the branches, moving about in their element.

It is the birthday of my mother, who would have been 93 today.  January is filled with birthdays and anniversaries.

When people are old, it is hard to imagine them as plump little babies, with that beautiful soft skin, that tender little back of the neck, and clear-eyed smiles.  But of course we all started this way, held up and kissed by our parents, fussed over, bathed and fed and marvelled at, worried about, loved.

Granny Gracie with my mother Joan

Pop, my grandpa, with my mother, whom he called "Peg o' my heart"

My mother was born in South Africa, a third-generation South African.  My great-great-grandfather John Webster was a baker who supplied the Karroo Zuurberg Pass roadbuilders (mostly convicts) with bread for many years and later had an inn nearby called Ann's Villa.  His wife Ann died at the age of 46 after bearing 14 children!  I am very glad that I live in an era with readily available contraception.

We went to Ann's Villa on an outing one day in 2000, as I wanted to see this part of the country where my ancestors had lived before leaving South Africa.   We spent a wonderful morning with the elephants at Addo, Tim taking many photographs,  and then travelled up the old Zuurberg pass, which apparently has a magnificent view if it is not raining like crazy as it was that day.  We had to negotiate hectic hairpin bends and avoid steep drop-offs through thick mist at times.

The little boys were so tired that they had fallen asleep by the time we eventually got there, but I rushed about with a huge and excited sense of my own history (and a sense of relief that we had successfully completed the Pass), looking at the family names on the gravestones, going into the villa and meeting some distant relatives who were renovating it, and then Tim took my picture standing proudly under the sign, "Ann's Villa".

When we arrived home Tim discovered that there was no film in his camera.

Anyway, my mum grew up in Sea Point in Cape Town, in a house on Trafalgar Square.  Such a different place from the crazy crowded city creeping steadily up the mountain-slopes as it is now.  My mother would play bicycle hockey on High Level Road on the way to school.  The little family would  just walk a couple of blocks behind the house, up to the mountain path where they would often go for picnics and days rambling together.

My auntie Nora, Pop and my mother.

Joan on the left was 14, Gracie 37 and Nora 12.

My mum was lovely.  She lived a good long life but I wish she could have died quickly like Tim's mother.  Her death was long and drawn-out and painful and I wasn't there for most of it so my sister had to deal with it all which was so difficult to bear alone and I am still sorrowful about that.   I have yet to scatter the ashes of my mother and father, kindly brought to me in a brown paper envelope by my sister a few years ago.  They are both there next to my bed, a handful of little pieces of grit and ash, with small shards of bone.  They are different colours too, just as they were in life. 

 I still wish I could tell my mother everything important, how the icicles hang shining from the gutter, how my son tells stories like his grandpa, how Matthew is going to Senegal, what it feels like to have granddaughters.  I want to play her Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp minor using Skype, I want to drink tea and eat raisin bread with her, I want to bask in the radiance of her smile.  I want to commiserate with her as we talk about awful things, rejoice with her in all the things we hold dear, and to understand how life is such a rushing torrent.

Day 15

It is so difficult to get up when it is still dark and cold!  I dutifully did many exercises and then ran 1.5 miles (2.4km) on the treadmill, as the roads were icy this morning and we slithered from our cars to the gym building, the black asphalt shiny and treacherous.  But the sun was shining on my unwilling heart and when there is all this blue bright sky after a few days of rain you can't help but feel more cheerful.

My Firstfriend turned the same age as me today.  (Although it is already afternoon on the day after her birthday in Melbourne where she lives on the other side of the world.)  We met when we were both only a year old, our mothers' meeting forging the two of us (and our mothers) into the best of friends.

A little older, so close, more than sisters, our wanderings took us all over Pinelands together.  Our mothers let us roam freely, often accompanied by my lolloping dog Timmy.  We explored the golf course near my house, roller-skated up and down steep hills we found.  We told everyone we were twins, although they may have been suspicious of this fact when we also admitted to having been born five months apart!  Also that one had lovely dark wavy hair and the brownest of eyes, while the other possessed a short shock of straight blonde hair and blue eyes.

We lived a privileged happy childhood in a suburb where groups of children played cricket on the playing fields near Trish's house, and in the gardens along the block, huge games of hide and seek, or some other game made up on the spot.  Our artistic leanings were the same, and we spent hours drawing, or colouring in coveted colouring-in books of ballet dancers, with crayons from the big Crayola box that one of us had received for a birthday, the one with about 500 colours, including the prized gold, silver and copper!

She was my first love beyond my family and still holds that place in my heart.   We are entwined together with those bright threads of connection from the old days, long ago now.

 

Best friends Trish and Anne at Dalebrook, circa 1961

My twin is also a grandmother, of darling Poppy

Orchids are exquisite.  We are fascinated with them because their voluptuous waxy petaled forms are so resonant of various things: birds, animals, insects.  But they are also bewitching to us because that is their modus operandi, employing seduction and deception to get their way.  Some orchids pretend they are nectar-bearing flowers to attract pollinating bees, while others actually mimic bees in flight hoping to "incite territorial combat  that results in pollination" according to a National Geographic article, although it stated "male bees" which doesn't sound right, although apparently male Carpenter bees do exhibit this behaviour.  (My knowledge of bees comes from keeping honey bees, but there are many different kinds of bees which do not necessarily live in colonies run by a queen.  My idea of a male bee therefore is a drone.  In autumn it is horrifyingly fascinating to watch my worker bees sting the drones, drag them out and throw them over the edge of the landing board to die.)

I have had two orchids for a few years, although neither of them have blooms right now, and so their pots are filled with just these rather flat, strange large succulent leaves.  It is always miraculous and exciting when I see that there is a new little stalk slowly emerging, with all that promise of delicate white furlings contained within it.

14th day

Went for a wet walk in Cambridge at lunchtime, around the block, looking at all the grey rainy houses, such close neighbours, feeling happy that I have so much space around my house, so many tall trees, so lucky to have room to breathe, so fortuitous to be friends with a meadow.

Blue paint is beautiful on a grey day.  Bright turquoise, deep ultramarine, cobalt, azure, indigo, cerulean, even the words conjuring up so many images: earth from space, the little blue marble of our planet,  the Caribbean sea, the stormy Atlantic, my childrens' eyes, my old school song, stage curtains, nightfall.  

The majority of people in the world choose blue as their favourite colour.  I wonder if that's the pervasiveness of the sky and its reflection in our eyes.

So we all love that blue depth.  But apparently we see red differently, men and women.  The ability to see red is contained in a gene which sits on the X chromosome, and women have two of those, therefore two copies of the gene, so we see many more variations of red than do men. 

So today here is a myriad of blue fragments of 8th grade Gerhard Richter-inspired abstract art. 

And then there is the damp smell of the road when you're travelling on a rain-drenched journey home from school in the pouring night, your nose aware of an acute mixture of asphalt and grass, car exhausts and splashing puddles, until finally by heart you know the sharp turn of the driveway, the dripping trees lining your path up the hill to the house with its bright windows shining, and inside your people waiting, and hot supper.

13th January

Woke up very early to skype, then off to the gym, only to realise once I was there, that I still had my woolly warm boots on, and the gym  personnel frown on running barefoot on the treadmill, so I just did all my weights etc, looking like a twit in my boots, and then came home feeling rather disgruntled and ran  2.8 km through the cold morning air, until it became coolly welcome on my hot cheeks and arms. 

It is the birthday of my little granny, my mother's mother, the bird-boned grandmother who struggled to walk, who my father would pick up gently like a baby and carry up the stairs when it was time for her to go to bed.  Granny Gracie.  She would have been 116 today.  She lived until she was 81 and died just a few months before her fifth great-grandchild was born, my Emma.  While I was pregnant I really longed for her to hold on so that she would be able to to meet my baby, but her later adult life had been immersed in pain and so I was glad that her suffering was over. 

My grandmother is something both natural and man-made, so I will only talk of her tonight.

She was born in Brampton in Cumberland, which was the place where Bonny Prince Charlie once had his headquarters, right in the Northwest of England.

She always believed that her name was Dorothea Grace, but late in life she received her birth certificate and it stated that she was Nina Grace, which came as a great shock to her, as no one had ever called her Nina! She was known as Gracie her whole life, and my littlest granddaughter bears her name next to her first name.

Gracie and her mother, Nora.

She was an interesting girl, climbing trees, playing the violin, attending Art School, and when the war came along, becoming one of the first members of the Women's Royal Air Force, working at Suttons Farm airfield, where she would sneak in her little brother Ronald who was obsessed with the planes.  He proudly kept a photograph of himself next to a Handley Page bomber, the photographic opportunity which Gracie had organised, for the rest of his life. 

Grace Hewitson at Suttons Farm Airfield

But all that changed after she met my grandfather, Gerald Webster, a South African pilot who had fought in Egypt during the war. 

Gerald and Gracie

They were married and she moved to South Africa with him, which was very brave, but life there was very different and not what she had expected, and two girls arrived in quick succession, my mother Joan and her little sister Nora, and Gracie was somewhat overwhelmed, returning again and again to England and her family, and then traipsing back to South Africa a few months later.  She was a sickly adult, and from her fifties suffered from terrible osteoporosis which left her unable to walk after several falls and breakages. 

Gracie looking apprehensive, her future laid out before her, unknown.

She was very dear to me, and once when I leaped out of the car to help her out of the passenger seat, I inadvertently slammed my door on her hand, where she had put it to hold on while she slowly tried to swing her feet out so that she could balance herself to be able to stand up with the aid of her walking stick and me.  I was horrified and opened the door again as fast as I could, but all her fingers were squashed on that little hand, and such pain in her face.  She tried to cover it up for my sake but I could see how much agony I had caused and felt awful, still feel awful, watched the hand turn black and blue over days, the fingers discoloured and useless.

She loved reading and listening to boxing matches on the radio, (of all things!) and giggling, and music of all kinds.  My mother would visit her at least 5 times a week when she was bedridden in a nursing home and I would often accompany her, all the years I was in High School.   She was generally pretty cheerful even though she was often in pain, and never "lost her marbles".  She adored my dad, that big strong man of the huge hands.  And he loved her too, she kind of took the place of his mother whom he had left in England when he came to live in South Africa just as Gracie had left her own family in England years before. 

When Gracie was dying, she asked for Jack, my dad, and when he went to her bedside she gave him a beatific smile, saying, "Come to my arms, you bundle of charms," which was the funny thing he would say to her when he used to pick her up, years before when she lived with us, and carry her to her room, because she couldn't manage the stairs.  It was part of the lyrics from a 1940's song they both knew.   Those were her last words before she died.

One of Gracie's nudes from her Art School days, part of the portfolio she left me when she died.

She is part of my line, the oldest from my bloodline whom I remember well, and now I am a grandmother myself, and all these lines draw the family tree, branches growing, names appearing and re-appearing, traits passed down, the colour of the eyes, the sweep of hair, the way a foot plants itself on the ground to stand the body upright.

January twelfth

Tim and the boys and I always try to beat one other to the car wherever it is parked when we come out of the movie, or the supermarket or wherever.  We helter-skelter, trying to remember where the car is in the first place, then darting in and out of the rows of parked cars, cheating by trying to distract or hold the other back until the last minute, and then there is the final mad rush to get there and be the first to actually touch the car! It is seldom that I win.  Tonight we went into the city to watch a movie and have dinner with Nick, and afterwards, coming up to the alleyway leading to the parking lot we all suddenly took off, but the young lion  beat the old lion by a few lengths, the old lioness bringing up the rear, running her heart out, but to no avail!

My littlest granddaughter is five months old today.  Funny how for the first two years your age is counted in months, and thereafter, once you have done all that amazing growing and developing month by month, you are measured in years for the rest of your life. 

Ella at two weeks with grandpa

Grandpa still has the right touch to send babies gently to sleep!

We are watching her grow remotely, but hope that in the future we can all live closer together.  It is torture sometimes to see these babies on Skype and not be able to reach out and hold them close, stroke their tender cheeks, cup their soft-haired heads in your hands, feel their comfortable weight in your arms.

Humans have been measuring periods of time according to the moon since Upper Palaeolithic times, about 30 000 years ago, according to ancient tally-sticks.  The Ishango bone found in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been given various interpretations by different archaeologists, and several scholars believe that it shows a six-month lunar calendar, or a menstrual calendar, and that it was probably made by a woman.  It is the fibula of a baboon, with a sharp piece of quartz fixed to one end.  (I was interested to read that recent archaeological evidence suggests that at the beginning of the Palaeolithic, about 300 000 years ago, people banded together in egalitarian groups, and that hunting and gathering were done by both sexes, and also, that they looked after their elderly.  There is a theory that the later division of labour was probably what allowed Homo sapiens to out-compete the Neanderthals.) 

The word month is derived from the word moon and many types of calendars, such as the ancient Hellenic, Hebrew and Islamic calendars, were based on the lunar cycle.  Depending on your location on the earth, the lunar orbit and cycle is not very constant, and therefore a solar calendar was gradually developed from the Roman calendar, called the Gregorian calendar, which has been in use since the mid-1500's and is used by most of the contemporary global community. 

The month of January comes from the Roman calendar and is named for Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions, usually depicted with two heads facing in opposite directions, looking to the past and to the future.  January is the gate into the new year, but close enough that it looks back into the old year just past.  (The original Roman calendar had 10 months, and winter was considered a monthless period!  Take that, Winter!)

So months are both natural (lunar) and man-made (twelve named months). 

You can remember how many days each month has by the little poem, "Thirty days hath Sepember, April, June, and November, ..." but also by looking at the keys of a piano and counting off the months starting with January on F.  All the months which fall on the white notes have 31 days. 

This is the mug Matthew made for me a few years ago.  I am very particular about the shape and look of the mugs I drink my coffee and tea from.  There are only about three in our cupboard which are aesthetically acceptable, and two of them were made by Matt, and this is my favourite presently.   

Day 11

Not finding a parking spot today at the gym I decided it was balmy enough to run, turned around and drove straight back out to do all the errands, after which I ran 3.6km in the forest and through the wet empty streets under water-logged skies, the only creature I met being a friendly sodden chocolate labrador ambling across the quiet road.  The thing I like about our town is that dogs are allowed to roam, there is no law against it as in many other towns.  You just have to attach a disc with your name and phone number on to the collar somewhere so that people can phone you if your dog wanders too far.  We have ourselves rung various people whose dogs we have found, and Molly frequently visited 'Kitty-who-lives-down-the-hill' (as she was known in our family) who took her into her garden to play with her Irish Setters Dylan and Clancy while she went inside to call me, again, saying, "Take your time, she's fine here."

Tim's mother died two years ago today.  We had seen her just a few days before, in the northern part of South Africa, on a luscious green farm where her daughter and son-in-law lived.  All four of her children had been together for a couple of lovely days, the first time for many years, with all the grandchildren and one great-grandchild there too!  It was a perfect summer's day, with a hot blue sky, and everyone had fun re-connecting and eating great food and sitting in the shade of the beautiful old trees.  And in the middle of it all was Elaine, the matriarch of this large family, a kind, sweet, strong person, with a gentle chuckle and the whitest of white hair, the epitome of a grand old lady.  She died how many of us would like to, after a long life, very suddenly, still independent, still "all there", still very present.  And after spending this rather amazing day with all her family around her. 

Skype is a brilliant invention.  Using skype I talk to my daughters and granddaughters twice a week, and even though we all live on different continents, they kind of know me.  Luna definitely remembers me and I make her laugh every time I talk and sing to her, and my heart is very full.  Ella was just a tiny thing when I last held her, so I don't know if she remembers me, but she does smile at me most times.  With Skype I have been present at bath-times, participated in Luna's first taste of solid food, read books with Ella, I have sung to her while her mother went off to find something in another room.  To counter the sadness of not living near these darling little girls, I can watch them growing and changing before my eyes, in that incredible first year of life, when a baby grows from a tiny helpless strange-looking creature into a walking, babbling little character.

So even though it must puzzle these babies, this strange flat grandmother, I am so lucky compared to my own mother who had to wait for the weekly Sunday night phone call, and letters, photos, and little movies on large videotapes, made for granny and grandpa, which arrived in the post every now and then, and the intermittent visits.

Apparently there are other VoIP applications such as Ekiga and Jitsi, but Skype seems to have the monopoly right now.  Ekiga used to be called Gnome meeting, which is quite wonderful.

Tenth day

No running on Fridays, always a long day which starts at 5am with the alarm going off and scaring me.  I hate alarms, hate waking up to their unnatural noise.  You wake in panic, your dream-self filled with consternation. Disoriented, you leap up to stop the infernal sound, then sink back down to tell yourself everything is alright.  Then you force your feet to drag your unwilling body to the bathroom where you sit on the side of the bath for the longest time, slightly unhinged.  What an awful way to start your day!

My sense of location did not work very well today.  I think Boston was getting me back for being rude about it yesterday.  I had to drive three students in to the IB conference, a regular trip of about 20 minutes, which took us 50, with several circular trips through tunnels under the sea, ending up at Logan Airport once and narrowly skirting it a second time.   I said several really bad words which teachers are not supposed to use, and although all three students were very supportive and sweet they were no help at all, none of them being drivers and therefore having no mind-maps of their own as to how the roads work. 

When we got back to school after their presentations, these dear students were so sweet when I apologized for the awful initial trip, commenting on what a wonderful adventure it had been, and eagerly narrating worse experiences they had had with their parents.

So Boston, I do love you, and here is a beautiful photograph of Luna and her mother on the Charlestown ferryboat last summer, and you are somewhere there in the background.