Tag: autumn leaves

One Autumn

It began with that first leaf falling. No one saw it happen, but you felt it in the morning the moment you woke, a chill as though someone had left the door open in an otherwise heated room. Tendrils of cold crawled over your skin. And then before you knew it, goose bumps erupted on the surface of your skin. 

When I woke that morning, my sister could not get out of bed. Her eyes were glazed, and she groaned. No school that day so no one was fussed she did not dress as usual and over the course of the morning when my mother came to check, the first spark ignited. Something was wrong.

 I bolted. Down the road to friends. My sister did not join me. An unusual move. Typically, she and I went everywhere together but this day she turned to face the wall when I said, ‘Let’s go play with Janice and Lesley.’ Two kids who lived round the corner and down the hill in a red brick half house opposite the park. The perfect location for fun. More so because both their parents, who were from Scotland and spoke with the strangest accents, were away at work. Even on a weekend. 

Janice, the elder of the two, even older than me, and at ten, I was old, was put in charge of her younger sister. And although they were allowed to entertain visitors in the form of me and my sister they were not to mess the lounge, go into their parent’s bedroom, or leave any dirty dishes unwashed and stacked away. 

Their mother returned every lunch time to check on them and otherwise they were free. By the time I left my sister languishing in her bed it was mid-morning and more leaves had fallen.

Later in the day when the ambulance came to take my sister away, and Janice and Lesley had decamped to my house, I overheard my mother mutter the word ‘polio’, and although I did not know what it meant, I knew it was serious. As serious as the girl at my school who had to leave in the middle of the day one day, not because she was ill, but because someone else in her family was.

With TB and it was contagious. You caught it off one another and. So, it was best for people with TB to be taken away to sanitoriums where they could get better, if they were lucky. And every member of their family had to stay at home and be tested to see whether they had the disease too. Something that caught in your lungs and made you cough and cough till blood came up. 

My sister was just red in the face, and drowsy. Not coughing.

‘A fever,’ my mother said and hoped she’d be okay. We should pray for her.

You prayed for sinners. You prayed for the dead to keep them out of hell or get them out of purgatory and into heaven. You prayed for people already in heaven that they

have a good time there and you’d meet them one day after you died. You prayed for the sick and dying in the same way so they too might reach that perfect place. Where anything you wanted you could have. 

There were times I longed to get to heaven and other times I was terrified at my prospects of ever getting inside, given all the stealing I had done over my ten years. All the lies told, all the times I’d harboured impure thoughts. 

My sister was different. If she did things wrong it was only at my prompting. She was young. God could not blame her for any bad behaviour if she were to die. But I did not want to think about this.

Her bed empty at night and the days and nights of her absence stretched into months and a whole school term passed before I went one day with my mother and the two youngest ones on the yellow bus though Ivanhoe to the infectious diseases’ hospital in Fairfield. There was my sister in a bed in a room filled with people, grown up women, and looking for all the world like a queen.

To this day I have wondered why my sister was taken away. Why she was the one whose body was invaded.

How it is that illnesses decide to attack one person and not the next? Why some are born strong and others with weakened constitutions that do not allow them to live long. While others can reach over one hundred years. 

Th lottery of life. And one I cannot fathom. But like all lotteries it is one of chance. Hence cruel and unfair. As unpredictable as which leaves fall from the tree first, and which ones fall last. 

My computer weary hands

There is an autumn leaf caught in a spider’s web in one corner of my writing room window near the outside ledge. I wonder how long it will stay there. Until the next gust of wind tears it away, until someone opens the window and forces it from its sticky moorings or later still when it has disintegrated and turned into lace ready to fall back down to earth, dust to dust.

I had so much wanted to write this morning and now I am here ideas evade me, and words refuse to come.

Perhaps I am ready for a break. Writing has become too much like housework. I do it everyday and like housework it comes back again the next day even more insistent than the day before and with the same relentless, ruthless, unending quality. Rarely do I reach a stage when I can say well at last this is finished, this is good. This will stand the test of time.

Most of my writing at the moment feels like the autumn leaf caught in the spider’s web outside my window. It hangs there, a leaf torn from a tree, a leaf close to the end of its life, a leaf that no longer serves a purpose other than to disintegrate and join the earth’s surface, a layer of dust, like my writing, a layer of words.

There’s a hole in my cardigan that needs stitching but I cannot be bothered finding needle and thread. Such a simple task and yet it remains like so many others – unfinished.

I have lost my sense of momentum. These days, tasks rise up for attention and I look away. I put off what was once an imperative till another day when it can no longer wait.

Why can I not settle into the business of completion, of housework, PhD, house renovations, writing?

Things I once embraced I push aside.

Is it a stage of my life, like the autumn leaf on my windowsill?
Have I lost my tenacity?
When did it start?

If I were to sit face to face with a listener I would say that I have lost my grip, that I have lost energy. I once had energy to get on and complete the tasks at hand.

I am not sure when it began, this downward trend, this energy less state, this wish to escape into isolation and comfort.

My memories lose their translucence, their conviction. I begin to doubt the certainty of my grip on the past.

Once I begin to write down a memory it shifts and sways. It loses the clarity it once possessed when held firmly in my mind and then takes on the clarity of the written word. It slips from me and onto the page and no longer feels to be mine.

I have leached out so many memories over these last several years that I begin to doubt my memory of myself. Have I explored too many memories now to believe them anymore?

Once I have written about an event I find I no longer have the impetus or desire to record that event again. It feels old and stale. It loses its guts. The clash between the way I imagine things might be and the way they are leaves me empty and listless.

I remember such times when I enrolled for a course through the mail – fifty piano lessons at a set price at the end of which I would be able to play stock standard favourites for family and friends. I found it advertised in the Reader’s Digest.

I had stopped learning the piano after only one year of lessons at school as a ten year old. I resented the way I had needed to practice after school when I could have been outside playing with my sister and my mother had better things to do with her money if I was not going to attend to my practice.

I dropped out of learning to play the piano but the image of myself as a concert pianist remained. In the advertisement the offer to get to this fantasy without any exertion beckoned.

My mother agreed, as long as we spread the lessons over time, so that she should not have to spend too much money too soon and I could prove myself by sticking to the practice.

The pages arrived. Pages of instruction, followed by pages of notes on paper, no different from the notes in my preliminary piano lesson book. I could not trouble myself with the tedium of reading through such instructions, if it did not happen by magic it would not happen at all.

Years later when we had been forced by circumstance to leave home and go into boarding school my mother told me she had finally paid off the last of my lessons. The contract meant that she could not evade the fees even if I did not use the opportunity.

And so it goes. Another opportunity wasted.

But I was young then. The worst years of my life were the years of my adolescence and beyond into early adulthood. Those were the years when I wanted nothing but for time to pass, that I cared only about the appearance of things, when I longed for love and in its absence contented myself with getting by.

Why was I not more dedicated then, why not more dedicated now?

In a few days we leave for England. Whether I want it or not, I will have a break from my writing. I will give my computer weary hands a rest from typing out words. I hope to come back refreshed and full of energy, enough to take a new tack in this blog.

I leave on 25 June for two weeks. I will most likely not post again until my return, but I’ll float around the blogosphere for the next six days and then take my leave.

Good wishes to you all.