Author: Ellen Bell

More musings on home. And I think of how fiercely attached Emily Bronte was to hers. Of course, I cannot know the truth of this. I can only go on how it is portrayed in subsequent biographical writings and filmic presentations, as with To Walk Invisible. In this, her connection with the Parsonage, and with the surrounding moors, is almost savage. I have never experienced such an attachment to place. Perhaps I lack her depth. I move more lightly through my life, I think. I can but admire such passion. As I do.

Happy New Year. x

An article on Home. This journalist wrote about making one in Wales. It made me think about how I feel about living here myself. Life isn’t neat. What one imagines may happen rarely does. I’ve lived here for over twelve years now. It’s hard to believe sometimes. It was a place I would’ve chosen. He wants to be here and I said I would stay. So there we are. That’s it. It’s actually easier, I find, to please someone other than yourself.

As I ponder over notions of home a friend writes to tell of his house’s subsidence. Everything is falling in, sliding down, moving. He sounds so distressed. Who wouldn’t be? I try to tell myself it’s only a house. It’s not. Is it? And there’s the family down the road. And their big house, unlit this year. No Christmas decorations or tree. After 28 years of marriage the parents’ have separated. He’s left. She stays. It’s all an undoing of some established order. And it unsettles.

There’s been a couple of newspaper pieces on peoples’ notions of home, prompting me to think about what mine. I was floored. There isn’t any one dwelling, that I can remember, that I would say epitomised home for me. Home is primarily safety for me, safety and privacy, and warmth and where I have autonomy. I cannot think of any spaces in which I have lived, either as a child or adult where I felt all of those things. It needs more consideration….perhaps….

I woke from a dream in which I’d lost him. We’d been walking through a built-up urban area and he’d suddenly vanished. I looked down a side road to see if I could see him, but nothing. Vanished. I started calling out his name. Over and over, in a kind of wail. People stared at me. One woman said she’d go and look for him, soon. I woke then. Looking at my clock, I thought it said, 1.00 am but it was 12.00. I’d put on my lights by then and so left them on and dozed. I dreamt I was without him again. Another road but a rural one this time. I was crawling along it, before I realised that I could actually walk it instead. I saw a pile of herringbone coats like his, in the road. And a woman in the distance, teetering in heels, carrying a take-away coffee. I wasn’t distressed. The air was springlike and a milky sun shone. I just kept walking forward, to what I know not.

I used to think it was a passive option. Now, I’m not so sure. There does seem a power in it. It’s a choice after all. An act of autonomy. This is how it is and I accept it, whether I like it or not. I choose to accept this. I will live with it, as it is. Like these Christmas time blues. I want to run from them, fight them, smother them. How about if I just sit with them, look at them, cry with them, and about them, and then just let them pass? Might that work? Boxing Day and I’m almost over it. My back is less tight. And, though the dark outside persists, I am ready to open, and to work.

It cannot be anything else, no matter how I fantasise to the contrary. They are gone. She is gone. She is gone and with her the hope of Christmases that can never be. Today I am ready to accept this fact, though my body still aches with the grief of it. Take it slow today. Do little and let the mind do its wondering….

I miss you most on Christmas Eve. I miss you so much that it hurs my heart. You made everything so beautiful. As a child I marvelled at it all – the tree, the table, the lights, the decorations, the smell, the sounds and the care. It stressed you but you did it year in year out without demur. Except at the end when everything that you’d loved and hoped for began to unravel. Thank you for those Christmasses and the life you have given me. R.I.P. x

They are such bringers of joy to me. And now to him. Simple things. Tiny buttons of light that pierce through the blackness of this now midwinter time. I shall be loathe to let them go come New Year.

I’ve an appointment in town. A break from my desk and this computer. I will lie down on a raised couch and be attended to. I will sleep and probably snore. It will be restful. And I shall enter into, albeit for a short time, another person’s life. That, for me at least, is restful. I listen to stories of another family’s Christmas, the food that will be cooked, the decorations put out, the presents bought. And I will picture it as I listen. All of it. In detail. And I will celebrate it. Another’s pleasure, that isn’t mine and yet is.