twinkle twinkle little star..

...there's a cherry tree, in full blossom, weeping snow flakes onto the the sheltered lawn. Just a hint of breeze. A lilac sky through purple painted trees, and a transparent silver salver of moon catching swooping swallows in its arc...

Presque vue, a mote of light flits and sparkles amongst thick, tangled lower branches of the furthest trees. Dancing in the gloom, a faery light, an animated dew drop in a mobile spiders web.

It glides and hovers, pulses and darts, gaining substance and size.

I watch. Holding my tea.

Is it getting closer, or just larger? Bigger I think, as it sparkles now with two facets and flits behind the chestnut's bole to re emerge larger still.

For a moment I swear it looks at me as I look at it. Disconcerted I look away, briefly, and see the sun reflected in the shallows of the old stone bird bath on which I shall shortly break my tooth.

'It' is now a ball of light. A whisper, floating upwards, gaining separate sparkles as it rises. Like a transparent sphere filled with icicles it flashes and sparks in the sun as it emerges from the trees.

As large as a tennis ball now, hesitating, slowly turning, sniffing and seeking, it's for me, mine, I know that now...and I am transfixed. No longer able to look away, despite a rising panic I watch in dread as it peels away from the high branches and drifts slowly, so slowly, down to where I sit.

Still it spins, still it sparkles, but no longer grows. It has no need, it augurs a huge sufficiency of power...and dread.

Through the cherry blossom it glides, not between the blossom but 'through' the petals, no ghostly transmutation this - but without transition, existence without substance.

Closer now, just yards, and I feel mute terror, snarling, wide eyed, bladder relaxing terror. There are words too,I can read them now. Banners with messages from hell that speak to me only, horrifying threats to my soul, that flutter around the relentless flashing orb.

Within arm's reach it moves rapidly to my right and I think of respite, sudden salvation, as it curves around behind me. But still my eyes are riveted as is my body, welded in place, and try as I might I cannot but follow it, straining, straining inhumanly, beyond the limit of flexibility I feel muscles tear in my neck...

This is the sort of thing...

...we have to put up with.

It’s not easy. Having said that it’s easier for me then it is for the boys. I can at least just walk, I don’t have an imperative compulsion to wee on something every few yards. It amazes me that they aren’t completely dehydrated by the end of the day, I imagine walking into a pub dragging two hairy husks behind me.

I imagine a lot of things. That’s the beauty (and the curse) of having oodles of time and space and no one with whom to share it (spoil it), one’s mind wanders and you’re allowed the room to indulge yourself fully in your own brand of jibberwaffle.

I’m stuck somewhere in my noggin with a half formed thought that the river is somehow allegorical, that I’ve passed my wicket gate and am on my own ‘straight and narrow’. It does appear to cut across (my) life, and if you’ve walked far enough, the where you’ve been, are, and where you’re going become blurred – blurred sufficiently for landmarks like bridges to become significant.

There are times when I feel I want to catalogue, to commit to memory, to burn sharp pictures of the abrupt end of woodland and the step forward into dappled sunshine, the gaping, forbidding mouths of dark pitch, echo less tunnels or even the sheet of sleety rain seen approaching across the wind.

But there’s no allegory here, for surely any simile should serve a purpose? I might so purposelessly compare Charlie’s bladder habits with April showers as the river with the habitual drawer of my life.
Eventually we’ll come to the sea, that’s all I know – at least I think I know that. Follow a river and you’ll reach the sea?

And now I need the sea. I’m full to overflowing with leaf littered pathways beside glittering moribund water. Sick of foppish beauty. I long for the brutality of open water on spring tides driven into rock and stone by bitter winds.

Do you ever dream of hiding tight behind the log, by the fire lit, in a whistling westerly shrieking it’s curse to the plume and spume of dying waves?

Life’s taken a turn for the gentle, and I don’t like it.