Walking from Pewley most evenings
I’m heading out into the feathered sky
So vivid it never fails to place me present
Reds ripened around the cathedral, every blue
Those purple streaks singing
The day in ribbons
Each evening is a dialled up encounter with wonder
It is beauty and terror tumbled up in teenage longings
It was the security I enjoyed that allowed for the scale of
these moments
Freedom giving parents lovingly catapulted me into the world
early
Leaving from Pewley made it a squared number
A home with long lineage
Multiplied meaning
I had roots to draw love from
Nutrients all the way down into Guildford’s past
My earliest memories were grounded where I would later lay
my head
Laced with an ancestral belonging older than me
I’d always pick up the pace on the downward slope
Reflecting on the house on the hill behind me
where, like so many others I love, I wrestled with youth and
change.
Continuously witnessed by the same walls and trees
Wide hedges contained our growing
A tree house amongst the apples
Plenty of blackberries and butterflies
An ivy carpet to walk on
An ivy column to wonder about
Hammocks to sway in, tents cropping up for a while
Endless lives given hospitality around a fire, a chilli pot
Or temporary bed
So many parties
The wooden floor still dappled in thousands of tiny stiletto indentations
Belonging to feet too many to name, now dotted across the
globe
That one where the hedge was fashioned into a talking giant
there were tunnels into the glade where a stage waited
More a festival than garden party
Always
A place to be creative and experiment
Later
Visits to the shed in hyper reality looking for the peace of
the wild things
A protective factor
The memories of endless games into the night
The scent, sound and tingle of dusk when most children would
have already been called in
A safe enough place outside, how lucky we were
Other protective factors include
Dancing together in the sitting room, all ages through the
ages
Quiet Sundays, reading
Family roasts and Friday curries
Honest conversation after the hard truth of another parents
evening
An old lady’s wisdom on the patio
Bathing my daughter in an orange bucket by the fire
Over 70 years, many babies bathed
These lists are probably inexhaustible
So the night would end
And I’d inevitably find myself on the uphill to home
(though I’d sometimes end up in the shed)
Under moonlight and under feelings of inarticulate nostalgia
Those walks where I’d be honest about my human loneliness
And I began to step a little way towards solitude
That is, the ability to be with myself
I’m grateful to have been shown that
good homes induct us into a larger home called earth
Grateful to have been given the chance to hear that call and feel such longing
The house housed the many universes and explosions of
ordinary life
Laughter though, along with everyday kindnesses, will linger
longer than even the bricks
Waiting under the foundations
It’s the same as the garden always was
Earth and ancient truth
Long older than the house
Though I perceive a link
When I pause on the fact our Grandad
Would go the long way into town
And consider the shared slower rhythm
Of connected values
That ripple out and are not yet finished permeating
