I miss them. I miss the guy in the white hard-hat with the smiling brown eyes who helped me and Nathalie across the trenches they had dug, lifting the buggy or the baby or the bike over the deep gravelly pits to safety, asking “Where’s babs?” when Nathalie was at school.
I miss the beeping of the dumper truck and the judder of the drill, the clang of the digger bucket and the chink chink of the pick axe, the shouts of the men. I am sad that they are gone.
But I like the quiet sound of the street as well. I like to hear the pigeon comfort itself with its gentle coo’s in the tree opposite and a car door slam and the shout of the rag and bone man as he passes, his truck filled with old fridges and bicycles. And Carol next door, calling to Maddie, as she turns the key in the lock after a day at work:
“Come on. Come on, bebe. I know. I know. Yes! I know.”
And the dog barking excitedly.
Things I could not hear with the workmen there.
I have been practising making tea. Being here, now, today, this minute.
Not always thinking of the next minute, there, then, tonight, tomorrow.
What I could be doing...
how life could be...
rushing making a cup of tea so I can get to the chat, rushing the dishes so I can get to bed, rushing the school run to get home. Hurrying Nathalie through her hesitant, stumbling, repeating explanations and Robin through her long complicated speeches to get to her point, if there was one.
In the tea-making there is peace.
The smell of the earl grey.
The sound of the kettle water muttering.
The chink of the cup as I get it down off its hook.
I take down the sugar jar and remember when Mark and I bought it, on a wedding anniversary, at Whitley garden centre in Huddersfield. I get out a teaspoon and it is one of the ones that don’t match and I wonder where it came from. And I reflect that it might have been Drummer Drakey’s, picked up from shared dish washing in the outside sinks at the campsite near Pateley Bridge when we both had campervans. And then I remember when Mark and I took our campervan to Harden Beck on a May Bank Holiday and parked in the field by the waterfall and a blackbird sang loudly in the sunshine from the branch of a tree, and we decided, after a row, that after 10 years of marriage we would at last try for children. And then I am thankful for my children and their health and their beauty and their longwinded speeches.
The kettle clicks.
All this from the making of tea. All this in a minute. All this to be missed in the hurry to be past the moment.
I keep forgetting. And hurrying on. It takes practice.
Philippians 4:11
Read last month's post: mother holle's eiderdown
