It is Summer
The boys are playing basketball outside. A game of 21. The first person to reach 21 wins. The sound of the ball bouncing hard on the flagstones is the new sound of summer.
Today is a big day for us. Oisin managed to get his Level 1 qualification in Gym. This means now he can work for the council. Not that this matters. It is one of those things he sleep walks into. He was helping out at the gym club in school and before we knew it he was trying out for his Level 1 qualification in the British Gymnastics Association. This while doing his Art finals and being warded in hospital for four days for a false appendicitis scare, while also studying for his GCSEs. He also did his Grade 4 in Piano and managed to pass it, just! and he has been under pressure but has taken it all in his stride. Laughing, happy, good humoured.
So, there is a small sigh of relief before the real work for the GCSEs finally kicks in. But I can see them, from the reflection, just having a great time in the lengthening summer evenings.
I have started running again. The mornings are filled with birdsong. The late start to spring has meant that the Dawn Chorus has also been delayed. Today there were any number of song thrushes, blackbirds, dunnocks and tits singing as I headed down the misty Comber Greenway. Everything seemed so new, like the world had been reborn once more. This is what I love most about spring. Everything has become possible again.
The garden is taking on a different look this year. This year, I am trying to see the garden for what it is. I am really not looking for the very short cut, but instead looking at what has come up in it. Plenty of dandelions and three-cornered leek. And Spanish bluebells.
I am writing down what i should do for next year. Plenty wild daffodils, with gorgeous double calayxes have come up in the garden. I am looking at the ivy, the forget me nots and the Welsh poppies. Also lots of aqualigea too.
I had to uproot a few possible trees. Sycamores are particularly good at starting in the tiniest spaces. I emptied the pond and refilled it with new water.
Tomorrow I will hoover the house and then do lots of gardening before heading out to the Festival of Fools. It appears to be another super hot day.
Well, i think i am going to get a glass of wine. I went dancing on Friday night. It was to a showing of La Haine with the soundtrack by the Asian Dub Foundation. It was just so awesome to be dancing to them again. It felt timeless.
Today I completed reading about Columba of Iona. It is such an inspiration. I feel myself at a turning point - something is happening, a retaking, a recalibration, a rethinking of things, retacking my sails. I love how everything is still open and possible at the age of 48. So many of my female friends are going through great changes. The older I get the more I rely on my female friends. There is a camaraderie in the battles we face. While we have our partners and husbands, the truth is that somehow, for me, in my life, my female friends have a depth which make me think of having run several lives entwined with each other. There is no ego in these female companionships which are constant with men. Very few men are able to surmount that constant need to be burnished by praise and adulation. It may have been charming at the age of 20 or 30, but as I get older and the men around me get older too, I tire of still having to pander to their insecurities which never seem to diminish.
BUT that doesn't matter. Men will always be men. I wonder about my sons sometimes. I hope that somehow having me as a mom has enabled them to be rooted within themselves so that they do not have to seek this vampiric like reassurance from women. It is not an accident that the character of Dracula is drawn to women. Men's longevity has long been boosted by the blood of women, particularly young women who are of course the only ones naive enough to fall victim to them. Us older women don't take that shit any more, of course. There is only so much blood you can drain from us, before we realise what the game has always been.
Of course, we then stop taking the shit and off they go, to seek another unsuspecting victim. Preferably young and untested enough. And of course, what do I know? Well, I was once a woman like that. Young and untested. But no more. A hardened battle scared warrior. Mother, fighter, lover, sister - a woman, rooted in her own power, finally. In the company of other she-wolves. Hear us howl to the moon and wonder at the melodious sound of our chorale.
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