Divine Letters - tea stained and creased but read them!

 

Should we claim spiritual insight or clarity due to birthright, experience, or education?

Gosh no!

Is there some special mental skill or knack that enhances our spiritual capacity?

Gosh no!

Is there something of value to be found in our own words that will engender internal change or growth?

Gosh no!

Do we encounter souls that allow us to learn from their insights, skills, and experience?

Gosh yes!

When we listen with heart and mind to the lessons wrought from lives, honed by their unique path in life, do we feel the possibilities of change within ourselves?

Gosh yes!

It is said that every person we meet is a letter from the divine. Some creased, written covered in tea stains, worn over time from repeated handling with last-minute additions scribbled in the margin. When encountering any soul find something of worth within. Some wisdom they have gained from suffering or from actions they have undertaken in service to others. Even if you find them bereft of every gift normally given to a human, destitute of personal graces or material means draw close and ask them about their life’s journey. Are such lessons from the poor and humble infinitely better than the prattling of the powerful and the rich?

Gosh yes!

Does the quality of any letter depend on its letterhead, embossed in gold with a fancy address and ornate seal?

Gosh no!

Somewhere in the grace of listening, we grow in empathy and awareness. Cynical analysis will not suffice only kindly acceptance befits the listener. Can progress result?

Gosh Yes!

Should we be grateful to these letters of the divine, hidden in simple garb? 

Gosh yes!

Does the quality of our response to such human letters become a measure of the Divine mercy we ultimately receive?

Gosh yes!

 ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Matthew 25.40

Our channels of communication have silted up with debris

My ears went pop and suddenly I could no longer hear, particularly from my left ear. Annoying, irritating but it has happened to most of us at some point. The usual remedy is to put your finger in your ear and give it a good shake. Or put one finger over the front of the ear and press hard to open that blocked inner channel. Pinching your nose while closing your mouth and giving a quick blow through your nose usually works. But for me despite all efforts, this strange deafness continued. 

My ear was obviously full of wax I surmised. And advice online from the Mayo Clinic warned against cotton buds in the ear. Who knew you could pierce the eardrum so easily with such soft things? On the fourth day, I consulted a pharmacist and was given drops for my ear to be inserted every four hours. I did that for two days with no positive outcome. Given the growing deafness in my left ear, I found myself adopting coping strategies. I walked on the left side of friends so that they are on my good side and I can hear them. I began to shout when I talked as if a raised volume in my own speech would help during conversations. 

I found myself strangely perplexed as to where the source of background sounds was coming from. Who knew that it was the stereo signal of two ears that helps you pinpoint where exactly that rumble originates? Without it, I look around bewildered awaiting visual signals to give me clues. Then, there is the noise in the deaf ear. That, I never expected. Instead of silence, at night in bed, the ear had a high-pitched hum with odd crackles randomly thrown in. As if my brain and ear have decided to stop normal communication channels and act like angry adolescents.  With either sullen silences or mumbling incoherence. Conveying no sense but a constant wall of annoyance and sudden unexpected hums of a range of frequencies.  

Finally, in despair, it had been a week, I queued to see a doctor. I sat in a waiting room with no official appointment but was shown in by the receptionist as the waiting room was completely empty. I sat 30 minutes in an empty waiting room hoping the doctor would finish with his client in his consulting room and fit me in as the receptionist had hoped.  After 40 minutes he was still with that same client and there was a surge of new patients into the waiting room. I realised with my heart sinking that my window of opportunity had closed. All these new people had pre-booked appointments while I had none. All of them, despite my 40-minute wait, were ahead of me. I left as deaf as I arrived and no further forward. I would have to endure the situation a little longer. Sleep was much, much harder with this noisy deaf ear. 

In these pandemic days seeing doctors in the UK is like finding the golden fleece. It requires extraordinary endeavours and persistence. Dear help those with serious conditions like cancer who have been left in limbo for too long. Lessons certainly need to be learned about how healthcare must be maintained and nurtured in good times so that in dire times it hits the ground running. Not underfunded and disembowelled from either incompetence from within or targets/changes from above. Too often, nowadays, it seems those put into positions are not there because of abilities but simply because of a lack of choice or who they happen to know. If the pilot of your plane got that position because he was someone’s cousin not because he was the best pilot you’d be outraged. You want the surgeon who operates on you or your loved ones to be of the best quality and a safe pair of hands with experience. Not someone promoted due to lack of other surgeons applying. Even before the pandemic two relatives of mine left their jobs as GPs because they were permitted to only spend on average ten minutes in appointments with each patient (one of the shortest times in the EU). We have to be so careful that we do not lose our best due to bad practice.

A recent study by the British Medical Association (published in May of this year) indicated that thousands of exhausted doctors in the UK are considering leaving the NHS in the coming year, citing excessive levels of stress and burnout due to the demands of the pandemic. The number of mature experienced doctors who are deciding to take early retirement has doubled in the last 12 months.  Professor Martin Marshall, Chair of the Royal College of GPs has indicated the chronic shortage of GPs in the NHS. Worryingly despite this present shortfall family doctors in England are quitting at a rate of three a day.  

As I live in Malta there is a different setup available here.  Each pharmacy usually has an in-house doctor available to see for a reasonable payment.  You do have to book in advance during these Covid days, whereas before you were able to just walk in and see a doctor.  Needless to say, after my experience of waiting in the surgery I made an appointment with the doctor.  He saw me the next day and prescribed ear drops and told me I would have to use them for three days and then come back.  Having already used drops to no avail I was unimpressed. And after three days, during which I became even more deaf I was back in his surgery.  This time the doctor took out a huge syringe that you would use on the rear end of a horse and blasted my ear with warm water while I held a metal kidney-shaped dish beneath my ear.  After three hard blasts, my ear popped open while the most disgusting stuff imaginable poured out into the dish.  The doctor showed me triumphantly the debris he had removed and it was impressive.  No wonder I had been unable to hear!  

I cannot begin to tell you of the relief I felt.  I could hear!  The world opened up to me again and a dreadful oppression of the spirit lifted.  How I sympathise with the hard of hearing now.  Every interaction becomes a source of concern, can one guess what the person is saying?  And even more worrying after three days you just pretend to listen, as if a person is speaking a foreign language you don’t know.  Gradually you withdraw from conversations and sit silent but uncomprehending adrift in a world of the deaf. It feels so good to be hearing again.  Why is it we only appreciate things when we lose them?  I like this quote on hearing loss as it strikes a chord.

“I hadn't really noticed that I had a hearing problem. I just thought most people had given up on speaking clearly.”

Hal Linden

There is I am sure a spiritual metaphor for this experience.  Sometimes we cannot hear the truth because our channels of communication have silted up with debris.  We can accept this new reality and just lower our expectations or we can take action and seek to cleanse the senses of all that has impeded them giving wings to our spirits and hope!

“First in a human being's way of life must be purity, then freshness, cleanliness, and independence of spirit.”

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, 

It only took two months to complete

I had left it undone for two months at least, which is obscene. I put the task off as it seemed non-critical in the face of larger global issues. In fact, I have long felt that tidying cupboards and drawers etc is best left to my close family members after my passing. I’m quite convinced that after writing that line there was a communal hiss of annoyance, “well count me out!” from my kith and kin around the world.

It’s not as if my belongings will attract rich pickings. In my case, anyone willing to tidy and address the chaos of my life will discover mostly loads of unused notebooks along with a hoarder’s collection of pens.  I will happily admit these two are my main weaknesses and despite already having a lifetime supply hidden away, the need for more ever beckons.  But back to my two-month lapse in tackling a much-needed task. I speak not about the drawers and cupboards but something much more personal, my handbag! Ever since I discovered the joy of a small backpack my handbag has literally become invisible. No more bags slipping down my shoulders or filling my hands. Now I experience the world free of this lifelong encumbrance. The blissful freedom is added to because the backpack also serves to straighten my posture. I’m not sure if I am developing a stoop or a dowager’s hump but either way the backpack makes it feel straighter. The only disadvantage is that out of sight is definitely out of mind. 

Today I tackled that forgotten task. I sorted out my bag.  I discovered boarding flight tickets and receipts galore. Official papers I thought I’d lost. An odd collection of passport photos. I think I’d become convinced that another set would produce a less horrendous result.  There were endless scraps of paper, chocolate wrappers, and handwritten notes to myself. I am a writer of to-do lists that are aspirational rather than achievable. For example, tidy my handbag had appeared on one list over four weeks ago. 

So why am I recommending it? Well, as a reflective tool the debris of your handbag exposes the personal state of your life. The chaos and confusion speaks volumes. Even one’s priorities in life become crystal clear. For example, I am obsessive about my phone and carry it everywhere. Not because others might phone me or I might need to phone others but because it records the number of steps I walk.  I now feel duty-bound to carry it with me at all times. Heaven forbid I do even five unrecorded steps! If I forget my phone I almost weep at the lost steps. Yes, you’re right - it is sad! I have even on occasion been caught by family members bounding from one foot to the other while watching TV and holding my phone, in a vain effort to boost my pathetic daily score. When I first downloaded the health tracking app it would send me little congratulatory texts. Like, 'well-done you’ve beaten your average daily step count'. Or tell me excitedly that I had walked the equivalent of London to Paris in the past week. Now, all that has stopped. The app is either sulking, disappointed, or knows me far too well to be willing to comment.

I carry some of my precious little notebooks in my handbag and at least half a dozen much-loved pens. Including one that will write on the moon. I kid you not. I have alcoholic wipes and a portable spray for these pandemic days as I am convinced that these hand dispensers in shopping centres are a source of contamination.  It is what everyone touches after all.  Masks are also a must. Who would’ve thought such things would be commonplace. This world is certainly unpredictable. Here I sit outside a café in Malta drinking coffee and remembering the last time I did this was December of last year. Spending all this time under lockdown really re-calibrated my personal habits. It feels really good to put pen to paper again. I have taken them from a very tidy handbag with a driving license, bus pass, personal cards, and currency all carefully sorted. I look around at others in the café wondering how tidy their bags might be with a righteous air.  I am then forced to admit that little amuses the idiot and what puerile things I pride myself on! 

But do tidy your bag. A dear cousin of mine had her house burgled and the police officer examined the atrocious mess of her bedroom and told her sympathetically,

“I’m so sorry that they have really trashed your place!”

 My cousin was thinking that it was actually tidier than normal, as the thieves had removed some of the contents. She didn’t say that of course! But it does suggest that at least with a tidy bag you can spot when something has gone missing and that is helpful right?  

There is also that peculiar feeling that when you tidy one thing, your bag, a drawer, a shelf that you have turned over a new leaf.   That having completed that one task everything else in your life becomes accessible and achievable in a strange way. As Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC) so eloquently pointed out, 

‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’.

Recalibrating in Dangerous Days

I sit and breathe deep. I think of all those we have loved and lost these days. Has not all thought become strangely recalibrated? It feels like one of those seismic moments when the atomic bomb exploded, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’. 

The poor have suffered disproportionately. Refugee numbers have swelled as the fear of fleeing is outweighed by the danger of staying in areas afflicted by conflict, famine, or drought. In response, the wealthier nations have pulled up the skirts of their borders to avoid being besmirched by the hordes. Old racial, religious, national, and sexual prejudices have harmonized with the selfish preoccupation finding vogue. Fashions fly in and fly out, but who would’ve thought that while we face a global pandemic these old poisonous siren calls would lure us onto familiar rocks once again. 

We’ve lost 3,9 million citizens, so far, to this new virus and yet there is little soul-searching as to the lessons learned.   Older problems causing even greater numbers of deaths each year are usually largely ignored. 

• Globally, at least 2 billion people use a drinking water source contaminated with faeces. We shouldn’t be surprised then that 850,000 of them die each year because they have no clean water.

• Nine million die each year in this world from hunger. 

• Seven million die each year from smoking. 

• Three million die every year from the consumption of alcohol. 

• At least 2.8 million people die each year as a result of being overweight or obese. 

• 4.6 million die each year just from air pollution. 

We have money-making industries that thrive despite causing millions of these deaths each year and I fear it is viewed as merely collateral damage. 

Nations have shown a perverse greed to protect only their own during this pandemic, allowing others to die from a simple lack of oxygen or access to a vaccine. There are lessons needing to be learned about how corruption plagues society. Of how even personal protection equipment can become a moneymaking endeavour for those with the wrong perspective but the right connections. How much money marshalled to face this pandemic threat has been swiftly side-tracked into the coffers of those whose greed exceeds their integrity. I fear we are suffering from a moral decay that has been eating into the vitals of human society for some time. It has lowered humanity’s immune response and as a result, opportunistic cancerous elements have been given free rein. 

Yet, I have a hope that the younger generation has a clarity the older population may have lost. They are not afraid to make the changes that we, who have been moulded for decades by this system, cannot. Whether it is admitting climate change, addressing injustice, or simply wanting transformative decisions on gun control, I find myself respecting this younger generation more and more. Astonished at how much they understand and how clear their thought processes are. Not tied into toxic habits that have twisted our own mindset. They are more united and more in touch with each other. They question these false gods of consumerism, materialism, and all the other ‘..isms’ that have dictated so many of the poor choices we have made. 

The world is tired of words it wants actions. It requires deeds that show we have found a way to live moral, responsible lives that contribute to the health of both this world community and our precious planet Earth

Stuff that works

 There are things that are really difficult. Difficult to start, difficult to do and occasionally impossible to complete. But for every single problem, we encounter there is often somebody out there who has found a way of solving it. And if you want a quick easy shortcut then it obviously pays to examine and learn from those who have mastered it. Everybody comes at life from a different path. Indeed,  they sometimes from a completely different direction and their landscape can look starting different from our own but they may well have learnt something along the way that you haven't. 

One of the beauties of the internet is that we get a chance to benefit from other unique perspectives. We can learn tricks and insights that even if we had a lifetime it would never occur to us to use. So in this posting, I wanted to focus on those surprising things that I have found work. They are a weird assortment and I make no apologies for that. Usually, the solution has been found by typing in my problem on the Internet and doing a Google search. Invariably this has resulted in a list of crazy suggestions tried by others and I usually give some of them a try. Needless to say, there have been many disasters along the way and in this posting, I wanted to highlight the successful ones that actually helped me. I share them in the spirit of someone who has sieved a load of rubbish and found a few nuggets of value worth retaining.

Ironing out defects

The first problem was how to remove water stains from wooden tables. My mother's coffee table was stained because someone placed hot cups on its surface. The white round marks ruined its look and my mother hates imperfections. I came across this video and have used the technique ever since to great success. Whenever a new white ring appears on any wooden surface my mother instructs me to use 'that weird iron technique' to get rid of them. My apologies if it doesn't work for you. I can only say that it has worked every time for me. I'm not responsible if you burn yourself so please take care. But it has worked so often and so well I feel I have to share it with you.  Personally, I find using no steam is better so either empty your iron of all water or turn off that option on your iron.

The medicine for dirty irons

The second trick is iron-related too and needs to be mentioned here at this point probably. What to do when your iron gets really dirty from ironing wood, or burning garments, or becomes sticky with some gunge.  Having tried and watched others using sponges, dishwashing liquid, elbow grease and more dangerously even knives or metal scrubbers on irons I found the answer was paracetamol tablets.  Yes, you read that right.  Not for consumption but to remove the stain.  I know you are questioning my sanity here but having first used this technique doubting it could possibly work I am a convert - it does!  Just make sure steam is off and you don't burn yourself while doing it.

Dancing as therapy

How to make dancing fun.  I am so self-conscious as a dancer that I look embarrassing on a dance floor.   Any audience is enough to trigger my inability to look even vaguely normal.  This is why I am so happy to watch others excel at it.  I am never going to be able to attain success but am settling for watching that it can actually be achieved by others.  Some do manage to excel and I can celebrate that even while failing myself.

Looking out for your neighbour

How to keep your neighbourhood safe.  When visiting a village near Oxford recently, I met an elderly lady who was concerned about all the people who lived on her street during Covid lockdown.  She knew many were quite old like herself, lived alone or had health issues and worried that things could be really difficult under a pandemic.  So she set up a WhatsApp group for every single neighbour on her street.  Then, made sure all were checked in by phone regularly.  When such contact was maintained, much-needed groceries could be delivered, medicines provided and most importantly of all, every single member of the street felt part of a tightly bound concerned community.  Isolation can kill and I was blown away by this small grey-haired lady's single-minded determination that no one would be neglected in difficult days.  It taught me that we may find it impossible to solve the problems of a city or a town or even a village but at a neighbourhood level, individuals can begin to do so much.

Building your own home

I found this obscure video with no talking or conversation that lasts for hours and hours about a guy making his own log cabin in the wilderness.  Thought it was one of those oddities that only I would watch, then had a conversation with my brother and realised he had also got hooked on this strange tale.  Here I share the five-minute speeded up version but if you fancy total relaxation, look for the longer version.

Learning Languages

Easy Trick to speaking French. Apologies for this to all my french friends and relatives but he is just so funny I have to include him. 

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=189086272405995

George Orwell - his craft and his challenge

 My father had a huge set of Encyclopedia Britannica which travelled the world with us.  I remember as a child fondling the huge black volumes of which there seemed to be dozens and later mastering the two books of indexes which helped you to find the information you sought.  I was awestruck that there was so much to learn from these massive bound books.  This was the world before the internet and I felt especially blessed that our home housed such a treasure-trove.  It did not matter what homework was given by teachers, this set of encyclopedias provided the gold standard information on any topic.  

Later, as a teacher, when a student of mine quoted Wikipedia or some Facebook posting in their assignments I would sigh in vain that now the information highway was so full of nonsense it seemed miseducation was the goal, not truth.  Then, years later helping students with their masters and Ph.D. thesis I realised this highest form of education was just endless repetition of the knowledge of others changed slightly to avoid the cry of plagiarism.  Okay, the sources used were peer-reviewed journals and much sounder than a web posting but this puerile packaging and sharing of the knowledge of others seemed to have become the new gold standard.  That feels wrong for so many reasons and I like this quote which gives a different definition and highlights some of the flaws of this particular knowledge system.

“Knowledge is a light which God casteth into the heart of whomsoever He willeth.” It is this kind of knowledge which is and hath ever been praiseworthy, and not the limited knowledge that hath sprung forth from veiled and obscured minds. This limited knowledge they even stealthily borrow one from the other, and vainly pride themselves therein!"

Bahá’u’lláh

When visiting my new baby granddaughter in England I wandered into an old graveyard in a beautiful hamlet outside Oxford and discovered the grave of George Orwell, one of my Dad's favourite authors.  Weeks later I wanted to read more about this writer and turned to the once so reliable online Encyclopedia Britannica as my source.  Expecting a balanced account of this brilliant writer I found myself disturbed by the tone of this particular entry.  Let me quote a few of the offending sections,

"He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma (Myanmar)."

Exactly who cares if his father was a minor official and why does the business success or failings of George Orwell's maternal grandfather reflect on the writer?  Does this not say more about the reviewer and their perspective of what is considered valuable?  If he had come from a long line of wealthy slave transportation businessmen with vast inherited estates would this reflect better on George Orwell?

 "Their attitudes were those of the “landless gentry,” ... lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to social status had little relation to their income."

Oh dear, does anyone else feel that this statement is strangely disturbing? 

 "Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery."

Here one wants to ask the person constructing this piece, is this meant to be the snobbery George Orwell experienced as a result of being poor?  In which case perhaps a different phraseology would be appropriate?

 "After returning with his parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and his intellectual brilliance." 

I have no problems with the young George Orwell being distinguished by the brilliance of his mind. However, I resent the implications that his being poor made him distinguished in some fashion.  Perhaps it would have been better to say that all the other students around him in the school were exceedingly rich.

"He grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys (1953)."

Here is an extract, from George himself, in that very essay, which tells the first few weeks of being sent to a private boarding school for the first time.

“Soon after I arrived ... I began wetting my bed. I was now aged eight, so that this was a reversion to a habit which I must have grown out of at least four years earlier. Nowadays, I believe, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for granted. It is a normal reaction in children who have been removed from their homes to a strange place. In those days, however, it was looked on as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose and for which the proper cure was a beating.”

And beatings were given regularly and harshly in this establishment at first by means of a riding crop, but when this broke during a harsh thrashing, a more sturdy implement took its place.  It was also clear to George at this very young age that those whose families were rich did not receive the same level of brutality.  Even the treatment meted out by older boys was cruel and as George himself sadly pointed out, "Against no matter what degree of bullying you had no redress." Little wonder then in this environment George became sad, uncommunicative, and was regarded as unconventional by others.

George won two scholarships to elite public schools, Wellington and Eton, not due to his birthright or family wealth but as a result of his abilities.  Despite his brilliance, he chose not to go on to university but instead led a full life enriched with experiences he would later use in his writing. My favourite books of George Orwell are Animal Farm, 1984 and Down and Out in Paris and London.  He is an insightful and brilliant writer whose perspectives need to be more widely embraced.  Poverty is never viewed the same way after reading the last of these books and 1984’s is a powerful prophetic piece.  Animal Farm is one of the most hard-hitting political storytelling pieces and my admiration of the character Boxer lingered from childhood to adulthood.  

It took me a long while to find Geroge Orwell’s grave because he did not use his pen name but his own given name Eric Arthur Blair on the gravestone.  Orwell’s friend, a member of the Astor family, had helped provide George Orwell the privacy he needed to finish his last book 1984 on the remote Scottish island of Jura. This editor professed great admiration for Orwell's "absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency" and insisted that on his own death he would be buried under an equally simple gravestone in a plot just beside his friend.   Somehow as a writer, George Orwell was able to convey a humanity and sensitivity that embeded within it the knowledge he had won from his own life experiences.  These were not stolen from someone else but crafted by a brilliant mind from all that he had observed and magically challenges those that read it.  

Jeannie McCafferty and the sorrow tree

Jeannie McCafferty knew she was unlucky.  It was clear from before she was born it would be the case.  Her mother Mary had had a difficult pregnancy and was strangely sick not just in the early months of the pregnancy but for the whole long nine months.  Mary’s wrists became as thin as a fragile child’s. Her husband George watched, worried and restless as the birth approached. When Mary died shortly after the birth George felt that he had stood by as his sweet wife wasted away and those shrinking fragile wrists were a marker of her gradually being taken from this world.  

For George, a poor farmer with no wife and a newborn the world felt empty and pointless.  However, his sister Taise moved into the home and helped with the baby and Jeannie was a happy healthy baby who gradually brought laughter to their little house.  She grew and though unlucky was as lovely as her mother so George was amazed how his heart healed with time and he knew his progress when he felt gratitude as he walked the fields around his small house with Jeannie’s small hand in his.  

Jeannie remembered as a toddler being afraid of the scary tree in the garden and crying each time she saw it.  There was something about its twisted tortured green moss-covered branches that reminded her of a crowd of people wailing and holding their thin arms aloft in distress.  When the wind blew the crowd became frantic and frenzied and Jeannie could not even look at the tree.  She called it the tree of sorrow and sadness.  George was amused at her sensitivity.  He knew the neighbours called Jeannie unlucky and noticed how they often sighed in sympathy when they saw the young girl in the fields playing.  George had no time for such nonsense his fields were few and earning a living was a full-time job.  They had a cow, chickens and grew tomatoes as well as vegetables in a small greenhouse outback.  But life was always close to the edge and George worked hard in his fields to squeeze out every penny they needed.  His hands were huge like shovels and Jeannie never felt as safe as when he clamped her small hand in his massive paw and walked with her chatting at his side.  

George’s sister Taise was a quiet kindly woman of few words yet she kept the range going all the year round and like a magician constantly conjured up sweet-smelling soda bread on its top and wonderful wheaten bread and cakes from its oven.  The three of them formed a team that worked well.  George and Taise were people of few words but kind hearts and they and the range warmed Jeannie’s days.  She loved the smell of fresh bread baking and felt sorry for those whose homes were not perfumed with its fragrance.  Jeannie talked nonstop and yet her tone was light and gentle so that George felt its absence from the house when she was outside.  He loved the evenings when the three of them sat around the blazing range’s open door and he listened to her talk about everything.  Telling him what she saw, what she felt and hoped for.  He knew her fear of the scary tree, how she loved the kittens in the outhouse and how tender her heart was.  Occasionally when he had enough energy, at the end of the day, he would take down his fiddle and play old tunes and Jeannie clapped her hands in excitement and sang along.  Her voice was gentle and yet she could hold a tune from a young age and had the ability to bring so much emotion to the old words they knew so well.  

If George could create a picture of their life together he would pick those evenings when he walked with Jeannie from the barn with his daughter beside him into the warm kitchen to find the table laid with food and his sister waiting to serve the hot meal.  The contrast between the cold cowshed and the cosy range and his family around him always raised his spirits and made him so grateful for what he had.  Then the potato blight hit and the whole country felt real hunger.  George was lucky to have his little greenhouse and his small vegetable plot with chickens.  Their potato crop rotted in the field and their diet changed.  All three lost weight but nothing compared to others.  George shared his tomatoes with his three nearest neighbours and hoped that it made a difference.  The rest they could not share as there was barely enough for the three of them.  When Jeannie held his hand George could not stop himself examining her wrists.  They were thin and she had lost that childish plumpness in her face.  It seemed to George that as her features thinned she grew more and more like Mary and a terrible fear filled him.  He and his sister did with less to try and boost her portion at mealtimes but Jeannie continued to lose weight no matter what they did.  There was not more energy for singing, no more abundant baking, each thing was rationed to make it last.  

They all felt that terrible days were upon them and all they could do was hang on as best they could.  The suffering around them grew and famine was evident. Their neighbour Mrs Tiley died an active sixty-year-old and her cows cried their pain from the barn.  George milked them, took them to her fields regularly and watered them enough to keep them alive.  He explained that he couldn’t let them starve but her son, who eventually arrived from Dublin at the homestead weeks after the funeral, had been resentful as if George had stolen their family milk.  He tried to explain that without milking the cows would have died,  but George could tell his actions were resented.  

Rumours spread about the farmer who stole milk from his neighbour in times of famine and in those days of hardship and anger the words gradually grew more toxic in the telling and spreading.  George told himself it didn’t matter what people thought but it hurt more than he could say.  Taise and Jeannie were furious that people could be so cruel, especially those neighbours who had known George for years.  For Jeannie it felt as if the tree of sorrow had now manifested itself as an angry swarm of people around them.  She felt the condemnation and the gossip and it sapped their spirits.  Up to this point, however difficult things had been they had managed but this accusation broke George’s back.  Already living on reduced food rations his health failed suddenly and dramatically.  Pneumonia set in and strong George found himself bedridden with lungs full of liquid drowning him.  Taise was frantic to help him and wrote to their brother Tom who lived in Scotland explaining the situation.  

It took Tom a week to arrive but when he did he helped.  Shocked at how ill George was Tom paid for a doctor to come from the nearby city.  Immediately treatment was started as the doctor explained there was now a new antibiotic available in injection form. Taise and Jeannie prayed and hoped that George would pull through.  Tom was a thin, short man efficient and quick in actions and words.  Two brothers could not be more different: the slow quiet laid back large George and this small agile clever sibling.  George began to rally and as Jeannie sat by his bedside a miracle seemed to have been granted.  George was able to sit up and eat some soup at last.  But his face was ashen and he had lost so much weight even his features looked different.  Both Jeannie and Taise fretted and worried.  

Neighbours commented that no good comes to those who do bad and George’s illness was felt to be a divine judgement of sorts. “Stealing milk from your dead neighbour!” There was a coldness and Jeannie overheard one toxic gossip say that the family had never had a good day since her birth, “Badness brings badness” she crowed.  Tom found Jeannie crying beside the kittens in the old outhouse.  He led her back into the house and explained “I think it better to focus on George than his reputation. You know what his character really is while his reputation is merely what others think he is”.  For Jeannie this was deep beyond words and evident truth.  It eased her heart and she looked afresh at this brother of George.  She had been so angry at this cruel neighbour but Tom waisted no words on blame but answered falsehood with insight.  She wrote his words down in her diary and would re-read their words many times.  She might have been born unlucky in the eyes of others but she knew a different reality and she felt armed against all the blows both past and future that others might throw.  Within a month George had recovered and was able to work once more.  The famine ended and Tom returned to Scotland while George, Tasie and Jeannie luxuriated in having their range producing heat and all sorts of goodies from its oven.  Jeannie knew they had all recovered when George took down his fiddle a month later and played while she sang.  They smiled at each other and were grateful to have back again all that they thought they had lost.