Day 55- Carnival

Almost all the day the sky was a grey duvet promising rain. But nobody gave up hope and the parade went ahead, all the colours brighter against the colourless clouds.

We were rewarded with the sequined sun, a real carnival queen, raising a cheer from the crowds. A brief blessing but enough.

And now on the way home, still feeling the beat of samba in my heels, the sky is swept clean again, all except a feather flush of grey, a carnival cloud dancer, leaping, leading the night parade.

Day 54

White feather clouds sweep the early evening sky while we wait for the concert to begin.
I watch mesmorised as men caress the curves and strings of their guitars like lovers, their fingers as light and fast as a wing beat.

Day 53

When I realise that we won't be home before eight and that the sun won't come out in time to light up our patio for dinner, I forget about linguine with asparagus and prawns and a squash of lemon and suggest the pub. We arrive hungrily just in time to fill up our grumbling grumpy bellies for only £3.50 at our old favourite Old Moat House carvery.
We drive home just as the light is dying and make plans for tomorrow's picnic.

Day 52

'As you make your way home tonight, may you pause for a moment to gaze up at the night sky and let you heart communicate with the moon in wordless dialogue. Perhaps you might compose a poem and set it down in your journal entry for today. I would like you to possess such a poetic spirit.'
(Daisaku Ikeda)

Last night very late I forgot to write about the moon.

How it was a perfect gold penny, rolling low just above
the Birmingham skyline.
How it rose majestically all the way down the M6 and the M1,
a light bulb brightening in a dusky room.
How I couldn't my take my eyes off it; a single giant pearl strung on the neckline
of the night sky.

Day 51- Verde Speranza

Even though I have known for weeks that it would happen, I was still unprepared.
I wasn't ready for the view over the tip of the hill; not ready for the bright burning gold turned to pale sage green, in field after field after field.

Our sticky yellow season is over, and even though I will miss it like a sister, I remember that in Italian green is the colour of hope.

Day 50

Remembering three people from yesterday...

A man in a fluorescent jacket, with fluffy hair and cheeks bunched under his eyes, standing at the same rail replacement bus stop as me, tells me yes I’m in the right place. Minutes before, someone, someone young he thinks, has been run over just up the road. We were both too late to witness it, yet we are caught inextricably in the horror of those long moments, eyes fixed on the ambulances, wondering why. He doesn’t get on the same bus as me, but smiles goodbye, sadly.

Hours later in Hackney, a cheery woman bus driver with an open face has half a cigarette at the bus stop waiting for a turbaned passenger to go to the brightly lit shop across the road before she sets off. I’m not taking her bus and she confides in me that she wants to give up smoking. She waves goodbye as the bus pulls away and I notice how it has suddenly got dark.

I just make it onto the tube, last leap through the last set of doors which are being held open by a crooked man on crutches, welcoming us aboard.He only has 64p he says, and I give him the shiny pence that I find at the bottom of my purse. Out of gratitude not guilt. As I get off at the next stop he calls after me have a safe journey home and I carry the words all the way, worth so much more than 15p.

Day 49

After a long journey alone in London I’m finally on the train heading home, eating a strange spontaneous dinner of chilli rice crackers, vanilla maple smoothie and fat sticky dates, bought all in a rush in the snatched minutes before the last fast train.

Day 48

Today should have belonged to writing, as I once hoped Mondays would, but it has belonged instead to other things that had to be done.
I have only stopped to eat.
My left over pizza at lunch, glossy with an extra drizzle of oil to stop it drying out in the oven.
Then dinner, organic salmon fillets- pale shell pink inside, given a golden sunset crust on the grill pan, lying next to the first asparagus of the year, the unsnapped stems still stringy.
Made with lemon and thyme and love by my man, served with my roasted new potatoes, eaten outside at our little table and chairs as the day cools and tomorrow's clouds start to arrive.

Day 47

The moon is a half blown dandilion clock watching us on our evening walk.
We follow a trail of black feathers through the spinney where the air is oven still and out into a sea of yellow green quenched in light.

I point out pale flower bells bobbing at the side of the path, 'Look, they're so beautiful! But I don't know their name...'

'They're still beautiful.' My wise husband reminds me.

Day 46

Today we were tourists in our own village following a new footpath map, treading lightly over carpets of clover and a froth of fallen blossom, lead by yellow butterflies, like winged buttercups.

We search out the rare oxlip, a delicate marriage of primrose and cowslip, and I think I find one, but decide I will check later on Google, the wonderful resolver of all mysteries in our family. (I just have and to my surprise I was right. My Grandma, knower of the names of flowers, would have been proud).

Something about that walk stays with me all day, and I try to be a bit more of a tourist in my own life, noticing each moment that has never been before and will never come again just like that.

Day 45

Outside there are ripples of laughter from the pub, across the night sky, knocking on the window.
Other people's lives all around us, more obvious in summer.

Day 44

Today I was thinking about Day 50 and that maybe I should do something to celebrate. Maybe drink champagne, even though it will be a Wednesday and I am sure I will be busy.

Today we walked through the sticky yellow fields, the flowers towering almost over my head. We reached the centre, the day 50 of the field, and had to turn back. The middle muddy patch there that never dries out was too soggy to cross with my dainty bronze shoes and my husband's ever white gym ones. We had been too much is a hurry to get out of the door and into the sun to think about sensible footwear.
As we turn and go back the way we've come I keep looking over my shoulder, squinting at the glinting water that stood in our way and I am tempted to take a running jump, long and light, defying the laws of gravity and mud.

Day 43

Awake for nearly 20 hours now, my skin paper thin and almost see through with tiredness, I am wilting like wild garlic leaves longing for the deep soil under the sycamore trees.

Day 42

I get home at 8pm, carrying a carefully wrapped tin foil parcel of lasagne, lovingly made by a sweet Sardinian friend. It is an even better gift tonight when I had been wishing not to have to make the risotto I thought of this morning.
We put the defrosted stock in the fridge and turn the oven on and wait for the whole kitchen to feel full up on the smell.

Day 41

This morning I wrote a haiku on the almost last page of a visitors' book, sitting at the same table where our wedding guests once gathered round to decorate the pages of another book, with bright scraps of fabric and verse, for us.

This morning I wrote

Rainbows on our toast-
a breakfast blessing to wish
us well on our way.

and some of my inexplicable heaviness lifted, like the shy sun light coming through.

Day 40

We go on a brave nettle picking expedition- naming flowers, nimbly crossing a rickety bridge, not looking at the bulls. The stings are worth it for the soothing soup we are rewarded with, tasting of nearly nothing but green and goodness.

Day 39- Tables

Before setting out, we linger even longer over breakfast, imagining how our furniture would look in another house, what we would keep, what we wouldn't. I wonder how the long pale table could be perfect anywhere but in the purple kitchen.

In the afternoon we drive deep west under the playful light and the heavy bodies of clouds accumulating while the windscreen is flecked with the delicate bodies of insects raining against us. The honey perfume of the fields and radio 2 follow us all the way and I spot sweaty leather bikers stopping to buy strawberries for sale in the lay by. We discuss how we would spend 86 million.

Later, much later, we gather round, cradling cups of brick red tea and listening to my grandfather, the missionary, the milkman, telling more of his stories.

You don't need a big house, you just need a table big enough to get us all round, he says.

You don't need to win the lottery, just enough for a table.

Day 38

'My head hurts'
'Shall I chop it off?'

We are lying facing each other on the bed, and for a moment I forget the pain and am lost in the thought of how good it would be to have my throbbing head removed, like a wilted rose gently and skilfully dead-headed, so that a new one can bloom in its place, full of lightness.

Day 37

All day, and even when I woke briefly in the night, I have thought of things to write.
Bright snatches of sentences come in and out of focus while I'm busy doing everything else.
But in the end I sit in front of the computer with the promise of writing while my wonderful husband washes up again, and I am lost for words.

It reminds me of spending all day dreaming up dinner, trying out ingredient outfits, and in the end, opening the fridge, closing it, making pasta al burro, a comfy jumper that covers all.

Today for once I'm not tired and I'm not lacking time, but I am lacking courage to sit here for as long as it takes to write what I really want to say.

Day 36

I've always been such a good sleeper, but these days I'm only skimming the surface of sleep and can't seem to sink deep down and bone heavy to the bottom; can't quite let go of my day and let it become dreams.

Day 35

I sit in a long traffic jam on the way home and passing the park at this pace gives me the rare opportunity to reminisce.
A stretch of green and water between two roads, one old, one new, both going in the same direction; rich with memories.
Starting with the tennis court where one obsessive summer I played my best friend every day, rally after rally, never tiring and for some reason never being asked to pay, despite the sign on the gate.
Close by there is the circle of trees, protective and ancient, once a forest to my four year old eyes when I was a princess and my grandma was a king, a wolf, a witch, whatever was needed.
And thinking of her makes me think of the museum, standing guard over the edge of the park, the museum that she made me fall in love with, the only one I ever have.

The lights finally change but all the way home I'm still there, the memories sparking one after the after like the fireworks watched in the park with the people I have loved.

Day 34

Today I changed my desk top photo from a Morrocan market stall to a Magnolia tree in full bloom, from daring stacks of spices the colours of autumn to the soft shell pink blossoms of English front lawns.
I hope Spring will take note and come back, so I can switch off the heating again and stop worrying about our brave tomato seedlings being knawed by the delicate but biting icing sugar frost.

Day 33

I wake up from angry dreams with a sore throat as though I have shouted my way through the night. I have the Sunday blues and greys and it is hard not to waste the day with worries.

But in the end I don't. Sometime in the afternoon the sun breaks through like a bright yolk. And now just before bed, I look back at the treasures of my day: time with my sister over an egg and sausage and sticky-fingered crossiant brunch; a drive into the deep and dreamless sky to dinner with friends, the delight of dark wood chopsticks, delicate bowls of rice, 3 colourful dishes and then mung bean soup, comforting like a pat on the belly, the colour of the fields at first light.

Day 32

All night I dream complicatedly and wake up reluctantly to a dripping colourless world, as though someone has tried to wash away yesterday's painting. Through the half moon window on the way down the stairs I see a plump pigeon, the same shade of grey as the rain and the roof he is sitting on. Who has stolen all the colours?

As we drive west the clouds loosen and I am willing the sun to come. The bluebells at the side of the road are a tender shock of indigo, colour unclaimed by the night thief.

Day 31

After work I nap and then have a bath and the grey light in the bathroom is exactly how I feel, pale with Friday tiredness. Although I am tempted to just make a bowl of spaghetti to go with yesterday's ragu, the way my husband's eyes light up when I say '...or lasagne' convinces me. We make it together, standing at either end of the stove, layering the red and white sauces, slivers of mozarella, fluffy parmesan and pasta sheets. Like making a bed.
Passing spoons, we discover that even after all these years side by side in the kitchen there are still some words we don't have translations for. We exchange them now. Ladle. Mestolo. And I wonder if we will remember them in the morning.

Day 30- Election Day

All day the blossom has blown past the window, restless on the breeze, unseasonal snow.

Today what we can rely on, what we can be sure of, is that there will be a change. Tomorrow we will wake up and even though the glinting gold fields will still be there and the birds will still rise up from the road just before they are run over and my kitchen will still be the same shade of aubergine, something will have changed. There will be a new tilt to the landscape, whether we like it or not.

After washing up the plates from dinner and two breakfasts, I start over again. I make a ragu, a hearty slow cooked sauce that will welcome us home tomorrow, when we will know. The house fills with its smell, brown and familiar, and on the eve of change, I welcome the reassurance of this recipe, known in my bones, never failing to warm my heart.

Day 29

I am out of the house all day and I miss my purple kitchen and its promises and the only yellow fields are from my car window, too far away. It is only very late, walking down dark streets on the way back that I notice the smell of the trees, night blossom like confetti at a wedding party, and I feel home again.

Day Twenty-Eight

We have run out of jam. The many times used marmalde jar is soaking by the sink making me want to fill it and pass it on again, to sit sticky and bursting with sweetness on someone's kitchen table.
But the timimg is all wrong, it is too late for seville oranges and still a little too soon for strawberries and my week is crammed full of other things leaving no space for jam so I buy a glass pot of nutella at the supermarket and put the jar back on the shelf.

Day Twenty-Seven

I stand in the shower as the hot water prickles on my skin and think how I really am not good at gardening and I would much rather be in the kitchen, waiting for my Italian green thumbed man to come in with a handful of forgotten treasure potatoes or a first strawberry promising summer.

While I wait for him to finish off the weeds I go to the kitchen to attack the remains of last night's dinner, finding a gravy tidemark around the rim of the washing up bowl where I'd left the roasting rack to soak.
I try to make my knife and fork like the jaws of a cat, a savvy butcher, picking every last speck of flesh from the chicken carcass; some on a blue plate for a leftover salad lunch, some in a white bowl for a later risotto, some in the compost bin, too greasy and gristly for anything else.
Outside, dandilion heads are falling, severed with a small blade while inside I finish the job with scissors, my favourite kitchen friends that I use for everything from slicing slipperly spring onions to dividing up hot pizza straight from the oven.

We sit down to our green and white salads, perfumed with lemon oil, speckled with sunflower seeds and on the stove the biggest pot bubbles with chicken bone broth, filling the kitchen with a new scent.

Day Twenty-Six

At 6am the house still smells of yesterday's salmon smoke, even after three sticks of lavender incencse, even after a whole day, it is still there to welcome me when I open the front door; a guest that has overstayed its welcome, like garlic in your mouth in the morning. The only thing for it is to roast a fat, hopefully once happy chicken, with a spitting lemon oozing inside, making the oven sing and leaving a new perfume for us to come down to in the morning.

Day Twenty-Five

I'm a quarter of the way through and I'm so happy that I started out on this journey. I have seen my life with new eyes every day, have noticed the sky more, the street more, the stories more. I have been fortunate to wake up from a long and fitful winter sleep to see 'spring exploding onto the scene' (Ikeda) and to feel it exploding in my heart.