There are people and things we take for granted until they are taken from us

There was a time when they were just so many weddings. It felt like the whole world had conspired to get married simultaneously. Especially to a 23-year-old me who had never even had a boyfriend! My fridge door was covered in invites and large periods of time was spent buying wedding presents and working out what to wear.  There were so many that they seem to blur into each other.

Then they stopped.  Suddenly it was baby showers that popped up interspersed with children’s birthday parties. Children’s presents, balloons and games dominated everything.

Unexpectedly the weddings stopped and as children grew into teenagers, who sneered at the very thought of a birthday party organised by parents, those parties frizzled out too.

There followed a long period of expectancy with no weddings and no birthday parties. In the gap that followed, we examined all the 20 and 30-year-olds around us wondering if marriage was even on their radar at all.

The sense of expectancy was broken by a funeral of a loved grandparent, then an aunt and uncle. Suddenly it seemed that the wonderful forest in whose shelter you have long stood is being felled. These major oak trees that have remained consistent for eight decades begin to topple. The void they leave is huge. There are people and things we take for granted until they are taken from us. Then the space they leave seems unsustainable, unbearable.  With each new loss, the landscape seems to change and not for the better.

I mourn my uncle with his smiling good humour teaching me about beekeeping. My aunt whose laughter was only exceeded by her golfing expertise. The list goes on I cannot name them all, there are simply too many.

Yesterday another dear friend passed away. I remember her living room, chairs all drawn close, warm and cosy, full of love and anecdotes. Rocking with laughter we shared tales of woe and triumph.  These immense oak trees are falling around us.  I mourn their loss, their integrity, their faithfulness and their love. I want to speak of these great souls and all those who are heartbroken at their loss. But what do words matter?

At one recent funeral my cousin was asked that traditional question, “what charity should contributions be sent?” He explained the family had decided that in lieu of giving money each person was asked to do a good deed in memory of their mother instead. What a lovely way to be remembered. As I see the voids left behind my thoughts turned to searching for actions in their name that will contribute to the betterment of others.  In among the fallen oaks seeds of goodness need to be planted. It seems a befitting fruit of lives well lived.

Can I speak of my delight in your arrival

Welcome grandson

Into a world being rolled up

Can I speak of my delight in your arrival

It is impossible to describe

How the universe has changed

Because of your sweet appearance

I watch in awe your expressions

Tiny toes, fingers grasping

Sweetness of expression

Sound, fixed gaze

Inspecting this world

With huge dark eyes

As if looking to see something of worth out there

Moving fists to gain control of coordination in air

And lungs learn to control

the important inward movement of that life giving substance

whilst your digestive system masters the tender art of expelling

the same life force from both ends!

A masterful ability

One of many that you will need to perfect

Welcome little one

May you progress and develop each precious day

May you bring joy and radiance

To this weary world

As you have brought to my heart

Listening to my son

Welcome you to this big wide world

Was as epic

As the turning of the spheres

My heart laid bare and shaken

With new born love

I breathe in your presence

And have to shout my delight

Welcome grandson 

Across Canada and The USA by Campervan

We were in a camping van recently, my family and I, recreating a road journey of over fifty years ago. It’s rare such things happen.  You always mean to do such trips but usually never do.  Life kind of gets in the way or runs you over.  Half a century ago my father decided to immigrate to Canada from NI.  He had a teaching post offer in the plains in Saskatchewan in a tiny hamlet called Piapot. So with his young wife and two toddlers (My Mum and brothers are shown in photo above) they headed out westward, where so many have gone before.  All of them in search of something better, I expect.  Later, he moved to Maple Creek a larger town nearby with proper shops.  On his holidays his persistent restless urge got the better of him, so he set off on an epic journey across Canada and The United States in a large car with his family.

It was this journey, which took us across Canada to Vancover and down the US through loads of national parks, that we redid in 2010.  It felt epic driving a massive camper van through country you associate with movies.  Coming from a small island the vastness of a huge continent is heady stuff.  The campervan rattled and shook as we drove and handled like a small house on a trailer.  As before, there were five of us but there were changes too.  I was merely an embryo on that first journey and my Dad had died five years before the trip.  He has left a huge gap in all our lives and he was the missing passenger on our journey.  He would have loved it. The lakes, glaciers, forests, plains all unfolded before us.  Then, when delight or weariness got the better of us, it was time for a nice cup of tea in our campervan.  Elbow to elbow with my brothers for the first time in three decades felt like revisiting your childhood as an adult.  Only this time around instead of fighting we enjoyed the closest company of all, family. 

There were challenges, my eldest brother’s boots (which had smell one cannot begin to describe), my mum’s skin reaction to mosquitoes (huge swollen pus filled protrusions), a hernia and more (don’t ask!).  But it was all great!  The open road, a huge campervan and total freedom.  We saw real live wild bears in the forests, swam in glacier lakes, explored and have photographs to prove it.  I’m so grateful for all of it.  In Maple Creek the school had been preserved as a museum, so my Dad’s classroom was there exactly has he had left it down to the posters on the door and exercise books.  There was even a picture of my Dad, looking so young, with his class beside him.  Strange sadness as well, as if we were close to him, but he was gone, out of reach, despite our longing.  

Piapot was different, the whole prairie area has suffered economically and there has been a huge exodus of inhabitants to the bigger cities.  So Piapot, which had always been a tiny hamlet beside the Trans Canadian Railway line, had shrunk still further.  The school here had been disserted for years with grass growing waist high around it.  Peeping through the front door everything was still there desks neatly lined up as if it had been left just yesterday and not a few decades.  It felt strange, as if we as a family had been transported back to the same spot 50 years earlier in a time machine. Then, as my brothers stood shoulder to shoulder next to the train lines, a huge endless train trundled past and sounded its horn.  It completed the miracle and we were all awash with the past, delighted to have caught this exact moment on the wind.  There is a photograph of my Dad with my brothers next to the same railway crossing and you’ll never understand it – but we were all there, every one of us, together again at that spot.  It felt like, this is the moment that we had come so far for.