Greeted by the earnest conversations of chattering Starlings spread across the Oak and Ash this campervan morning. The cold has returned to leave its mark before departing for good. Crisp once more underfoot, everything is dusted in a geometric, brilliant crystal white. Hands firmly grasped around the coffee cup, momentarily keeping cold at bay, steam and breath firmly on the air. The sky a pale, pale blue with the faintest of white brushed over it. Pink bellied Gulls pass high overhead. A few Crows flop across the sky in their usual chilled kind of way. The Oak and Ash now bathed in the brilliant light of a hearty sunrise. I can hear a couple of Robins and far off Crow cries. A solitary Blackbird buzzes into view and then quickly leaves and for evermore the monotonous drone of far off traffic keeps us all company.
The final part of my posts about places and my understanding of them that comes in later life as Winterson wrote :
“ You can talk with the dead, talk with your lost self, your disappeared self, and you can visit those places again, and understand it differently. That makes a huge difference.”
Some years ago I drove past and visited the house I was initially brought up in and the school opposite where I was first taught. I had not been there since leaving when I was ten, so it was a good 45 years. A huge number of emotional and physical ghosts came tumbling out and peace was finally made. Well not finally there are still a few occasionally marching around, as they are in all of us. An incredibly evocative experience. The writer Liam Callanan writes :
“ We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us. “
We also carry the people that are with us and around us from the the youngest of days till now and onwards. My ancestral draw to visit places and be in the north took the acknowledgment of past memories of places seeing them differently and making peace with them to allow me to wallow in the present rather than the baggage of the past. A bit of a muddled dander through my personal experiences of places, the laying to rest of ghosts allowing me to see places differently. Now I am losing feeling in my fingers the cold has taken hold. Lovely days people.
“ If you need some change and some clarity, go to your altar.” Robin S. Baker.
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