welsh hills again

So many things crowding my mind as we come up to Christmas this year.  This little baby has joined our ever growing family, older daughter's second child, long awaited and much loved.  And within weeks there will be more babies, with daughter in law and younger daughter both due very soon after Christmas.  It is a total delight to have more babies coming into the world but I want to be everywhere at once, sharing the time with everyone, making sure everyone is ok.  This is daft, I recognise, as my presence won't make anyone any more ok but I have found before when babies are due that there is a part of me which doesn't settle until everything is done and I know everyone is ok and that I feel a powerful urge to see, in the flesh, to be there myself to assure myself that everyone is fine. How lovely it will be to have these cousins growing up so close in age and as part of the burgeoning family of cousins.  It is hard to express how very blessed I feel. ...

Well the latest birthday has come and gone and I find that, despite how strong the urge was to write about the experience of growing older a year ago, I have actually written less in this last year than ever before!  It is now a whole three months since I blogged at all and I have even been considering giving up altogether but this morning I was delighted to see a new blog after a break from penny at homemadeheart and it gave me the kick I needed to have a real think about this.  So I thought I would use the blog to have a look at this last year, to think about why I have written and not written and to help me decide whether I want to keep on writing. So why, after years of writing something practically every week,  has my blog slipped away, especially when I really wanted to explore what it is like to grow older as a woman of my generation, with a life very different from that of our mothers and grandmothers? So many reasons, silly and serious! Instagram. I lik...

I had an email from a friend which touched on something I often think about: time and how to use it and how to share it.  I have quoted her original email below because she expresses the questions so well. "I was wondering - you've recently (relatively) been released from many heavy obligations and demands. How are you managing your freedom? Are you able to just enjoy or do you have duty voices in your head, cutting across any 'holiday' feel.  There's always enough to be done. So it's easy to always be thinking 'I should be doing this, that, the other....' Do you? Or have you beaten that? I'd love to know how if you have, so I can learn. And C is just about to retire and be here full time apart from walking. I find his activity ... reproaching and disturbing. This is me - he doesn't bug me if I'm not being busy." Two separate but related questions here and both of them particular to this stage of life I thi...

I like clothes but I don't like shopping.  When I was working and needed business suits and formal evening clothes I used to shop once or twice a year.  I would take a day off work and make a beeline for a particular shop or small group of shops.  A new suit, with both trousers and a skirt, tops to go with it in interesting colours and silky materials, shoes and boots, a new dress to wear for smart dinners: everything had to go with everything else.  I much preferred to do this shopping on my own.  A friend came along with me one year and was exasperated by the way, in her terms, I wouldn't "look at things properly".  "You shop like a man" she said crossly.  Certainly I don't like spending a long time thinking about it and looking at lots of alternatives.  It was important to look good and to get it right but in many ways it was like shopping for expensive school uniform. Nowadays I can wear what I like.  Mostly, living up a hill in the mid...

As we get older, if we are lucky,  we live a life that suits us.  We find our tribe, we settle into our interests, we create our world from our family and friends.  We know what we like.  We know how we want to spend our time and what simply does not interest us.  We build a world around us in which we feel safe and happy.  When I look back at how life felt for me when I was in my late teens particularly so much of what I remember is the discomfort of not quite fitting and of not quite knowing how to behave.  I spent time with people whose values I did not share.  I did things I did not enjoy simply to fit in.  And then I slowly began to learn who I was and what mattered to me and to make my world in that shape. It is good to have made a life that fits you and to feel comfortable and happy within it but I have been thinking for the last few weeks about comfort and challenge, about the need for self care and the risk of complacency, about...

When we moved up here twelve years ago now I did not really think about roses.  I like roses but I like all sorts of things and there was so much else to think about with the prospect of trying to make a garden in a nearly one acre field high on a hillside.  But that first summer I found that there were some roses here. Mainly they were these: wild roses in the hedges, simple dog roses, simple perfection. And there was this one, an undistinguished looking shrub rose by the gate through to the field.  I have no idea what it is called.  The flowers are small but the colour is deep and the perfume is one of the strongest in the garden.  The first time I walked by and was hit by a waft of the scent I decided it could be as ordinary looking as it liked, as long as once a year it smelled like that. And there was this one.  At the time it was struggling in the kitchen garden, growing between two posts and looking sad and straggly.  As part ...

It is May.  Is there any month more beautiful?  I have been making a new herb bed in the kitchen garden, digging out an area which has become full of grass and ground elder.  At this time of year you could work in the garden all day long and still not finish what is to be done so if we are to seize the moment it is important not to fall prey to the endless to do list, either written or mental.  It is important to seize the day. We walk up the drive, through the farmyard and out onto the hill.  Cowslips are blooming at the edge of the drive.  In Welsh they are called Briallen Fair, Mary's primrose.   A little colony of these was growing up here when we came nearly twelve years ago now.  For a few years they appeared every spring, the patch never really growing.  Then a couple of years ago they took off and began to spread.  Now there is an area perhaps six feet long crowded with them.  Unlike primroses, they hold their heads hig...