ellen bell

They’ve come down. All that sparkly stuff has gone. The house is bare. And I like it being so. Christmas is over, and that attempt at brightness is no longer appropriate now that it is January. I must face her, in all her bleak, cold starkness.

The body is a demanding vessel. It is hard to step out it. To deny its needs and desires. I walk in the cold, my fingers stinging in it. I find myself thinking of little else but making them warm. They call up all of my attention. I want to stop, remove my gloves and draw. I try it, but not for long. It is too much. My hands refuse to work, to submit. My body has taken over. I am lost in its forces.

Holidays in her home, as in the wider world, means that the usual happenings are put off, dispensed with, until everything is back to normal. People living in institutions and reliant on others for the fulfilment of their routine are, understandably, unsettled by the uncustomary lack. She wasn’t in her room when he called her. He tried several times. She called him back in the end. She had texted him, saying that she’d be away. One of the carers had offered to wash her hair. It needed it, she said. This carer is a kindly one. She often brings her fruit, bought with her own money. A hair wash. A simple thing and yet a big thing. A small act of kindness writ large.

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….