All posts tagged: memories

Back To The Start… #DVersePoets

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So it started with a broken laptop. Or maybe it started with your brother, pointing you towards a target, that wasn’t me by any means, but I was somewhere on the other side of it. Or maybe it started with an offer made to my Grandfather, which he passed onto my mother and her new husband. Or maybe it started with a newspaper ad, Welshmen need not apply. Or maybe it started in Ireland, with a broken engagement and a ferry ticket. Or maybe we are so far from the start there is no point loosing myself on the path back to it. The sun rose again, and the weather changed its tune but that’s not the start.

Rooftops At Sunrise – #FridayFiction

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The ladder from the garage wasn’t quite tall enough to reach all the way, but it brought us within touching distance of the guttering. From there you could pull yourself up and afterwards, reach down for my hands, smaller, thinner, not quite as adept at clambering about. I let you lead me to a lot of places I couldn’t reach on my own. Perhaps I should have worried sooner about being left behind but back then all I could think of was how strong you were. Lifting me like a bag of sugar to watch the sun set beside you.

Crooked Crockery

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In my parents house there are cupboards crammed with mugs. The matching sets seem to fade at various speeds, one never quite the same rate as the others, and the mugs near the back are so crippled and cracked you’d wonder who’d even dare to drink from them. In the summer when the days are long and the fields full of tractors, we rediscover the cups barely larger than a thimble. The ones that only come out when the dishwasher is mid-cycle, and everything else is scattered across driver cabins and pick-ups. These are the days when the cry goes up for the purge and new eco-systems are discovered. In my own house, the mugs are just as mismatched. While the other half buys four the same, I horde crockery one piece at a time. Even the sets are unique in each individual piece. One a pheasant, a rooster, a hare, a fox. Sizes, patterns, colours, the cupboard is a threatened explosion. Some speak for me, ‘Go Away I’m Writing’, ‘It’s Okay, Writers Are Supposed …

Moments Of Magic

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The memory has lost some of its sharpness, like a photo with dog-eared corners and thumb worn edges rediscovered from somewhere forgotten and old. But I can still feel the scratch on my palms of chunky stone walls marching onward towards the shore where the sea swam darkening around the ruins of an ancient fort. While the sun sunk beneath the waves and I squinted for a sight of Ireland on the horizon, and the sky turned red and orange and pink and… green. A single streak of emerald, old news to the locals, but pure magic to me. Inspired by today’s Daily Prompt: Vivid    

Speed Bump

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I always forgot that the bump was coming. The little humpback bridge on the road to The Wharf. The one that sent your stomach into your throat, that had my sister and I whooping in the back of the car, small hands clutching the seats, convinced we had momentarily left the ground. I could believe we were flying back then. When you’re small everything seems bigger, faster, brighter than life. Granddad’s driving was like that for us. Bug eyed at seventy on the speedometer. We thought that was the fastest that anyone could possibly ever go. He was wild and exciting, not like those fuddy-duddies crawling along at twenty down the A41. He doesn’t take the bridge as fast as he used to. Now that I’m older, I think he only sped up for my sister and I, to make us smile and shriek. A lot of what he did when we were small was to make us laugh. We were his princess, and he was out merrymaker. ‘Gone to see a man, about a …

My Grandfather

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‘One of the old men fearing no man’ Thomas Yarnton of Tarlton by John Drinkwater My Grandfather no longer ages. In photos from family gatherings he stands taller than the rest of us our constant invariable. Despite broken ribs, eleven, smashed sternum, destroyed spleen, punctured lung, fracture wrist, cardiac arrest not once but twice! Despite the bull’s best efforts, our urges to lessen the workload, relax, take time, watch the races and leave the farming- An old farmer never retires. He doubles the size of the vegetable patch, rebuilds fences, two new stables, buys a flock of ewes (in lamb) (and claims they’ll lamb themselves… we all know they will not lamb themselves.) To him, technology was foreign, but, to prove the family wrong he bought a laptop. And taught himself to use it in six months. (Though email still proves elusive And the last text he sent me was blank. Still. My Grandfather is the same as the man in my memories, And even at my most feminist I did not mind to be …