I may be absent from blogging for a while. I hope to still visit you all but my visits are likely to be quiet ones. Wishing you all the best for the New Year.
Author: Andrea Stephenson
THE TERKEL — Storkwrite
Last year around this time I shared a Christmas short story I’d written. This year I’d like to share a touching short story written by a blogging friend of mine, Michael Bruton. His story has atmosphere, magic and the kind of sentiment I associate with this time of year. Please visit and enjoy the story!
Lizzy stood at the window; she smiled through the tears that now trickled freely down her cheek. She watched her young son, Gavin, her only child, as he ventured out along the garden path into the snowy Ceredigion morning. The sky was a deep winter blue, and the fresh, chilly wind blew the few stubborn […]
Read the full story here: via THE TERKEL — Storkwrite
Igniting
December is the month of artificial light, when our townscapes gleam with the cold twinkle of illumination to ward off the darkness. Teardrops of amber. Scrolls of silver. Cascades of gold. White garlands and pinpricks of pewter. Kaleidoscopes of lights. On the high street it is often too much: too gaudy, too synthetic. But on silent streets and in deserted parks, they are islands of light to guide us through the night. Windows flooded with colour welcome us home, so that we can turn our backs on the discomforts of the darkness.
December skies are flushed with colour. Dawns of orange and purple; twilights of pink and blue; a half moon lighting up the darkness. Stripes of wavery tangerine cross pale peach. Fingers of pink span baby blue. A full moon hangs in a blushing sky. Perhaps nature is trying to rival the pull of electricity. Artificial light is pretty, comforting and useful, but it will never equal the display of a sunset or a sunrise.
On election day, we vote before dawn. Afterwards, before work, I walk in the country park. It is dark, barely light enough to see. There is no colour yet, only shades and shadows. Trees creak, undergrowth rustles. A blackbird trumpets in alarm and I hear the distant chink of a moorhen. Ducks descend on the pond, first a pair, then a quintet, mallards in silhouette. They cackle as I walk the path to the sundial.
The coming sunrise inflames the trees, glowing through skeletons. The temperature is two degrees above freezing with a biting wind: it is bitter up here at the top of the hill. Coloured twinkles in the distance, the hills chains of artificial light. Sunrise begins as a vivid orange splash, brighter than any of those electric lights, but it soon becomes more nuanced. I won’t see the sun all day, but it puts on its show from behind the clouds. Violets and pinks, oranges and reds, blushes and blooms of colour. The sea is a violet stripe prickled with platinum. The sunrise pushes back the electric lights until they disappear.
Crows appear, swooping and cawing. Next, the gulls begin to call. Finally the muted voices of songbirds and the stutter of magpies. The sky lightens to a block of grey-blue cloud with a strip of buttermilk across the horizon. The park regains colour. There is a sprinkling of autumn leaves and berries, but most of the autumn colour has leached from the landscape. A charm of goldfinches flutters from a tree as I pass, leaving a lone dunnock behind. I have seen the blaze of dawn but now daylight comes quietly.
It has been a speedy and subtle season. I have hardly noticed the darkness. As the glory of the leaves faded, the skies blossomed. Autumn is gone and winter is gaining, but there is little fanfare. Election day passes more quietly than I expect. It seemed like an important day, with an opportunity for real change, but ends up as more of the same. The creative spark is sleeping. I’ve felt weary and in need of a break. Soon the solstice will be here, when the light will ignite once more. And my break is finally here, a stretch of gloriously leisurely days that will lead me to the light, sky by painted sky.
Catching dreams
On the first wintry day of the season frost crisps the landscape. My breath billows in clouds of white. The sun is honey, oozing through the heart of the cherry tree and turning the last of the leaves to gold. It is a moment of between, when the earth makes me pause. The chill shivers the leaves from the trees. I can hear them falling. They crackle like flames as they detach and float to the ground. The fire is a cold one, but I feel as though I’m standing in its heart: the crackling is everywhere, the air is gold and a blackbird trills. It is a precious, dreamlike morning. There won’t be another one like it this season.
I sometimes dream of searching for places that don’t exist. I dream that behind the field at my aunt’s is a path that leads to a group of small ponds I’m desperate to get to. On the way, a seahenge has been revealed on the shore, covered in light snow. I never find the ponds. I’ve searched for them before without success. I can picture myself bathing there, yet I only remember their existence in dreams. When I wake I struggle to recall whether they are real or not and I grieve for their loss.
The leaves are moist and turning to mulch now. They no longer glint with gold but have browned and darkened. They are fodder for the dreams of worms and woodlice. But the remains of gold still cling to the trees, like sheets of gilding. Willows dip long tresses of yellowed leaves into a pond crowded with birds. A man is feeding the ducks. Black headed gulls screech and dive. Moorhens peck the shore. Three swans sail among them like a vision: a pair and their cygnet. The cygnet is bigger than its parents, snowy feathers offset by soft beige. I walk past yellowing reeds and bright berries, the last of the season’s lights. I look up at the moment two swans soar over, softly whooping as they fly.
I have been recording my dreams again. It is one way of confronting the darkness and what lies within it. Some are slippery, some never ending. Creatures flit through them: barn owl and crow, polar bears and bison, and a strange hybrid of mole and teddy bear that clutches my fingers with tiny pink hands. In dreams I am myself and not myself. Sometimes I begin as me but become someone else. My dreams are mostly prosaic: processing real events and populated with people I know. But among the ordinary are those moments when I wonder if I really have visited another place and brought a little of its enchantment back with me.
Blogger book of the month: Pamela S. Wight – Molly Finds her Purr
Pam’s blog RoughWighting is full of funny, intriguing and quirky stories both fictional and true. She has a fellow Piscean’s knack for visiting other worlds and bringing back a little of their magic. Pam has written two exciting and enjoyable romantic thrillers for adults and another children’s picture book, Birds of Paradise but today it is Molly’s turn to step into the limelight. In Pam’s newest book, Molly Finds Her Purr, Molly is a stray cat who doesn’t know how to purr. Birds run away from her, dogs bark and squirrels bombard her with acorns. She tries her best to find a playmate, but it seems she’s destined to be lonely – it’s no wonder Molly doesn’t know how to purr! But then a squirrel called Petey takes a chance on friendship and Molly soon has a whole circle of friends around her. It isn’t long before she finds her purr. A heart-warming, comforting and gentle book, with beautiful illustrations, Molly introduces themes of difference and friendship in a lovely way for young readers. A great Christmas gift for a child in your life! You can find Pam here and her books are available at Amazon.
Wounded
This is the way it will be now: walking in the darkness before dawn. The world rain-washed, figures no more than shadows. This is the way it will be: darkness falling before I leave work, walking home in the dark. Summer officially ended with the winding back of the clock and that extra hour gave darkness a space to seep in.
Three times recently I have woken from an unsettling dream and into a panic attack. The darkness has seemed too thick, too close. The dawn has seemed much too far away. I have had to get up and turn on every light, go out into the yard to breathe in thinner air. I have had to open my curtains wide so the glow of the streetlamp settles me back to sleep.
I have always appreciated the power of the dark and the things that are revealed there. Darkness is fertile ground, a place for dreaming. But this season I have dreaded it. I have dreaded that long spread of days when the only daylight is diffused through my office window. And yet in dreading it, I have embraced it. At the year’s turn, I stood in darkness and welcomed it and it hasn’t been something to fear after all.
There is loss in the darkness. Something wrong in the park in the gloom of early November. A disjointedness. A commotion of songbirds fluttering aimlessly. On the edge of the park where we walk every day there is a bungalow. It is surrounded by a long privet hedge, at least fifteen years old, maybe a metre deep and taller than I am. You can see it in the photo above, a backdrop to the cherry tree. It is thronged by birds all year round and buzzing with insects in summer. And it is gone. Chopped down and ripped out. Over the coming days the garden is paved over and a wooden fence erected where the privet once lived.
The privet belonged to the owners of the bungalow, and yet it didn’t. It became part of the park and belonged to all the creatures that used it for food and shelter. I’m finding it hard to get over its loss. Without it, the landscape is wrong. The whitebeam sapling that was planted in the spring and has lasted all through the summer has also been lost in the last few weeks – broken off at the trunk. The whitebeam was an infant compared to the privet, but I still feel its ending. I wonder if the landscape feels these wounds the way I do. Does it recognise that some key part of itself is missing? There is loss in the darkness. Perhaps that is the price of the dreaming.
But there are gifts too. Autumn has been kind to those organisms that live in the dark, waiting for their moment. Fungi have revelled in the rain and released bloom after strange bloom. I have revelled in hammering rain and bellowing wind. The air births a rainbow against a glowering denim sky. A skein of geese squawks overhead and a puppy pounces joyfully on a leaf. The crow guardians in the park swoop a greeting as I arrive with a handful of peanuts. These are the lights in the season’s darkness. I breathe in as many as I can for the days when the darkness is too much.
And I have a talisman for the season. Owls have been shadowing me since I came across an owlet in the forest in midsummer. Now I have a little friend to take me into the darkness. Frivolous, fun, but with eyes to drown in all the same. She was blessed and charged at the year’s turn and now she will travel with me, helping me to remember the light in the year’s dark.
Blogger book of the month: William Holland – Shadows Kill
Bill Holland is passionate about life and passionate about writing. He shares observations and questions about both on his blog Artistry with Words. Bill is also a prolific writer. Shadows Kill is the first in a series of (so far) four unusual thrillers. It is a gritty, intelligent and fast-paced book that will have you hooked until the final chapter. The author has a knack of making you care about the characters very quickly, which means that you’re both rooting for them to win through and fearful about what might befall them. The book starts from an unusual viewpoint, not that of a straightforwardly ‘good’ cop or investigator, but of a character who is a vigilante of sorts and therefore poses questions about morality. But despite this, I came to care for Eli very quickly and couldn’t wait to turn the page to find out how it ended. A well-written exciting read and a great introduction to a series. You can buy Bill’s books on Amazon and you can find his blog here.
Fences
Halloween is the day when there is neither past, nor future, only between. Before the year turns, I have a notion to re-visit the green places of my past. I step out into a breezy day, leaves rustling in spirals on the pavements, rays of sunlight bursting through grey cloud.
My past has been fenced off, built over, locked away. We were urban children, grown on a Council estate, but there were always patches of green, hints of the wild. The ‘res’, the ‘cut’, the ‘back field’, these were the edge-lands on our doorsteps. Our lives as children were lived along these tracks and in these spaces. The walk to school and back, the trails between each others’ houses. The green spaces for playing, exploring and hanging around.
The first of two reservoirs, at the top of the street where I used to live, is a trapezium of grass tangled with purple clover and dock. The gate is locked. Perhaps it always was, but we got in anyway. I always found the reservoirs puzzling and slightly mysterious. How could a field contain a reservoir of water? I never quite believed they were what they were supposed to be. There is an old stone building, stamped 1901, which must have been some kind of access or pump house. It is boarded up, painted with graffiti, art deco railings rusting around its roof, rubbish and weeds littering its steps. There is talk about building houses on top of the reservoir, squeezing yet more dwellings into one of the last green spaces.
There was a park once, where the newest houses on the estate have now been built, an open space with swings and climbing frames. The ‘back field’ is still there. It was once just a ragged patch of land behind houses, with waist high meadow. Now it is a water-logged square of shorn, vivid grass. I disturb a posse of blackbirds in the shrubs at its edges. I wonder how much it is used, and for what. It seems unlikely that it is ever allowed to become as overgrown as it once was.
But my sycamore is still as I recall it. The only tree I remember as an individual from my childhood, it stands on the corner, arcing over the road. When I first read To Kill a Mockingbird it was this sycamore that I pictured when I read about the gifts left in the tree.
The ‘cuts’ were narrow paths between. Each was the length of a street. A narrow lane beyond the back garden fences. A pathway between houses and the reservoir. Small slices of nature, bordered by trees and plants. But no one will be travelling those paths again. They are blocked at each end, locked behind spiked metal fencing. I stand looking between the bars, yearning to walk the old path again. But within the fencing, nature has taken advantage. Brambles, grasses and small saplings have reclaimed the path. They have become liminal places but not human places. On this still autumn day, they are peaceful pockets of green behind the bars. Who knows what happens within the fences while the people aren’t watching?
The bordering reservoir has been fenced off too, metal spikes above the wall. Fences and fences. Adjacent, my old school has been demolished and re-built with yet more of the ubiquitous railings. There was a time when a farmer’s field lay opposite the school. I still remember the feel of the ploughed furrows under my feet. The old hawthorn hedgerow is still there, now backing onto houses. It is a reminder of a past when there were spaces to explore and everything wasn’t locked up tight. It is half-term and the children are on holiday from school, yet I haven’t seen or heard a single child during my walk, only the ghostly footsteps of those who have left childhood far behind.
I cross the busy road to get to the cemetery and leave the fences behind. Here there are meandering paths scattered with leaves. Tilting headstones rooted with ivy. A laburnum like an umbrella sheltering graves. The foliage is still mostly green, but maples appear like pools of light in the distance. A large leafless hawthorn has berries like fairy lights. A giant beech is a beacon beckoning me along the path.
My ritual tonight is all about stripping back and letting go. I am letting go of the year just gone, and all the years that have gone before. The past is a familiar place, but not always a comforting one. I have witnessed again the way the world never stands still. The fences represent a changed world – one in which it seems necessary to fence children in and fence others out. But fences are no barrier to memory. Once, small feet traversed this landscape without impediment, and the imprint of their passage is part of the landscape still.
Shedding
On the day after the equinox, on the day light tips into darkness, it is on this day that autumn arrives. It is my first day back at work and it has been a fortnight since I was in the park at 6am walking Winston. For the first time since early spring it is dark. Not completely. The sky is cobalt rather than indigo. Figures are vaguely recognisable. But it is still a shock to the system. Before we leave, a bat circles the air around us, the first I’ve ever seen in this park.
From a distance, it is clear that autumn has come. Great swathes of green trees are tinged with a touch of gold. There are beacon trees, flaming torches in the hedgerows, usually maples. But up close, the landscape is still remarkably green. Walking through the country park, it is the fireweed that offers the fieriest colour.
Last year gales ushered in the equinox. The old poplar in the park was rent by wind, an enormous limb blown to the ground. This year summer bleeds gently into the equinox and autumn steals in amid mist and rain. I had longed for September, but it passes in a flash, the last of the summer washed away by rain, wind, mist and frost. Spent raindrops form clear beads on hawthorns full of haws. A trio of blackbirds bathe in an enormous puddle. Raindrops dance the Flamenco. Fungi has blossomed on the damp bridleway. I count five species: more shaggy inkcaps than I have ever seen, a scatter of puffballs and others I can’t identify.
There is a different energy on a true autumn day. The air feels thinner. There is movement. Not only of the weather and the leaves, though that is part of it. The world is shedding, falling apart, but it’s a joyous shedding. And then there are those still autumn days full of gold, when the sun lights up trees and teasels from behind and makes rosehips glow. The dene is a riot of golds, reds and browns, overblown and overgrown, having a last chaotic burst before all the leaves are shed. The grass is scattered with leaves of a different kind: pages from a book, burnt around the edges, shedding words into the landscape.
And the new season has given me energy. I’ve submitted a dozen stories, revised a few more, started writing a new tale about poppies, the harvest flower. With the rain and wind has come optimism. My ears are clear and so is my mind. The last year was gloomy, a struggle to get through, but now I’m shedding the year that has gone before and preparing to dream.
Blogger book of the month – Roads: a journey with verses by Smitha Vishwanath and Vandana Bhasin
I have accompanied Smitha Vishwanath on some exciting journeys via her blog. I was there as she went through a huge life change moving from one country to another and became accustomed to her new circumstances. And I was there as she embarked on a creative journey to become a writer and a fledgling artist. She has now published her first book of poems with fellow poet Vandana Bhasin.
This book of poems by two talented poets promises to take the reader on a journey and delivers and epic trip. The journey in question is that of life, and the book is split into sections that cover many of the big themes we all face on that journey: courage, wisdom, love, strength, joy. Both women contribute to each theme, offering a delightful contrast of views, imagery and tone. Smitha’s poems are intimate, emotional, drawing on a strength from within, while Vandana’s poems are open, assertive and sometimes confrontational.
The journey begins with ‘courage’ and it proves to be a positive and uplifting start. Smitha writes about daring to learn, fly, fail, even if the journey to success is not smooth. Vandana rails against rules and victimisation and demands that we drop the masks we wear. There is a nice rhythm to the collection. It moves inwards towards ‘wisdom’, ‘serenity’, ‘love’ and ‘joy’, then looks outwards to the world with ‘strength’, ‘compassion’ and ‘hope’. There are quiet moments and demands to be heard. There is sadness and joy, despair and self-assurance. And each poem is accompanied by a personal piece giving context to the verse.
Some of my favourite poems by Smitha are: ‘The Night is my Refuge’, a soothing poem about the restorative power of the night; ‘Treasure the Little Pleasures’, an evocative poem about the importance of small things; ‘Hush Daddy! Don’t Fear’, a moving poem about caring for an ageing parent; ‘Tender Moments’, a quiet loving poem in which a mother watches her children sleep; and ‘The Little Corner Room’ about a haven in her grandmother’s house.
Favourites by Vandana include: ‘Today’, an encouragement not to put things off to a vague tomorrow; ‘It’s all in the state of mind’ captures that dissatisfaction of wanting something other than what we have; and ‘Wings of Freedom’, a soaring poem about hopes and dreams.
The book ends, appropriately, with ‘gratitude’. Smitha’s ‘Promise of a new day’ is a beautiful meditation on things to be thankful for, while Vandana’s ‘Moments of Gratitude’ has the rhythm of a prayer. This book is an uplifting, enjoyable and emotional journey with two very engaging guides.
You can find Smitha here and the book is available on Amazon.
