It's been a long time coming (but worth the wait...)

When my partner and I moved to Suffolk to start our new life together nearly six years ago, we didn't intend to leave it so long before we tied the knot!  

 Despite setting the date twice before in the last three years, life had other plans for us, but finally we found the perfect time to gather our children, their partners and the little granddaughter around us to say 'I will' in the lovely Norman church just at the bottom of the hill.

And it was a perfectly magical and very special day!

Summer Garden

The roses under my bedroom window are so beautiful this year.  They, at least, are loving the wet, cool weather we have been having this summer.

I dream of having the time to just sit in the garden on a warm afternoon and not constantly to leap up to pull up a weed, or grab a trowel or spade to attack whatever is discordant.

And this is where we do sit on the rare warm evenings we have had this summer, with a glass of cool sauvignon blanc when the day's work is done.

It was so good to have Mum to visit the other day and see her enjoying a bit of late afternoon sunshine in our garden.

A Rose for a rose

I call them my shadow children, the ones I lost over 30 years ago; the embryonic lives that were never lived. Their spirits stay with me, on the periphery of my consciousness, the what ifs... the might have beens...

Of course I grieved for them deeply at the time, even though I never held them in my arms, never kissed them and changed their nappies, never left them at the school gates, chivvied them to do their homework, saw them launched onto lives of their own; lives in which I would have only a small part to play. I never knew the colour of their eyes, the texture of their hair, the smell of their skin, their personalities. I planted a rose in memory of my lost little ones and it has moved with me from one house to another over the years. It helps to embody them somehow, gives me a quiet focus for my private thoughts.

I was lucky. Despite the early difficulties, I now have three handsome, hulking, grown up sons who have filled the empty spaces in my life and given me little time to dwell on what was lost. But I have been thinking of them recently, following the sudden, unexpected death of an old friend's 16 year old daughter, a lovely young woman, full of bright promise; she had shared her life and filled her thoughts and dreams. She should be eagerly awaiting her GCSE results - she would have excelled - gone into the sixth form, fallen in and out of love, spread her wings, gone on to university, had a career, married perhaps... children of her own. All wiped away, never to be.

What solace can anyone possibly give to a grieving mother? What can ever even begin to help her to heal? She wakes up every morning to experience her loss afresh, as though for the first time.

I shall give her a rose to plant in memory of her daughter. It's not much, but apart from being there for her if she will let me, it's the best I can do.

The Orchard

Summer's here!

The hammock went up in the orchard today, strung between two ancient plum trees, threaded through with the tiny pink-scented roses that flower for only two weeks each year, echoing the delicate pink and white blossom that studded the trees earlier in the spring, promising a heavy crop of pears, apples and plums when summer slips away.

The mown grass is a vivid green after the recent heavy rains, and delicious dark pink Amy Robsart roses glow in the hawthorn hedge. A faded, weather-beaten wooden table and chairs invite me to take time out and let my cares melt away.

I thought of going somewhere else today, but what could be better than this?