BIRTHDAY IN BADGER’S WOOD

It rained all day today. It has been raining most days this week. No walks for Dad. There’s a giant puddle in the pavement outside our house where our next door neighbours’ twin girls jump... where other children, unknown, wrapped in rain jackets, pause, position their boots carefully, and then jump! jump! jump!

A week ago, it was my birthday, and while I was still sleeping, Mum garlanded the front door, the dining room door, and one extra garland in readiness for my neck when I awoke; she hung birthday banners, geranium leaves and hibiscus everywhere that I might see and rejoice in being loved. I felt so loved and content that when it turned midnight, I wanted the day all over again. From seeing the Singaporean siblings off to school on their bus, to opening presents sent by the Malaysian twins, a bread maker sent by my brother, cards from afar, and talking to my childhood friend Fudge and her daughter in Bombay about dogs and drawings and fairy lights.  

I floated around all day, baked a Victoria sponge cake that evening and then, the next morning, when Joseph aka Badger, arrived to pick us up, bundled myself into a warm cosy blanket, mask on, and off we went, like the three bears, to Badger’s Wood. This was Dad’s first outing since his fall almost a year ago, and although he managed a goodish walk into the wood, he had a near turn in the heat - so I hustled back for water and Badger ran back for a chair and we all collapsed, while Dad recuperated in a kingly fashion, among the birch and blackberry bramble. 

Yesterday, during my respiratory consultation at the hospital, I shared the secret to surviving my new form of home therapy by subcutaneous injection - Colette and I FaceTime. Tuesdays at Two. We are each other’s video girls, smiling, laughing, commiserating and listening, each to the other, as we move forward in this strange pandemic, made stranger by the needles and tubes we administer in the casual atmosphere of home. The three medics present and the nurse who had trained us were all intrigued, impressed and hoping to present our buddy system at the upcoming European Immunology Delegation as an idea for all new patients and perhaps even the veterans - to help cope with pandemic isolation and the claustrophobia of an unshared trauma. It helps to have a friend-mirror. Coco and I have known each other for years, hence the trust in visiting Badger’s Wood at all. We didn’t hug, much as we wanted to, but just being near, sharing stories and warmth and courage, was enough. Clive would have hated home injections. Claerwen, his daughter, would have had to inject them for him, so he would have had company one way or another... 

I am reluctant to pull the banners down, but oh so grateful to have felt like celebrating myself. So grateful to have been cocooned in loving messages from California to Peru. Most of all, I suppose, I am grateful to have tidily tucked my infections away into what I Hope was the final admission of the year. Winter will be upon us soon, I hear you say, but my eyes are still busy with summer days...

GUEST POST : IN THE LAND OF TORIA

While I was in hospital, my friend Victoria sent me photographs of her garden. There are gardens in my hospital, one in particular that I claim as my favourite, but while in a shared ward or private bay, there is no green to be found. Blue and cream aplenty but no living, moving green. So I thought I would share Victoria’s photos with you, with her permission, so you can see what cheered me...

Of course there are other ways to escape while in hospital. My new friend Mary, with the wandering mind, was not in Addenbrooke’s at all... she was in Selby in Yorkshire, and sometimes in the mining and weaving towns of her youth... sometimes she would give me directions to the cemetery nearby and sometimes she accepted that I was not real, I was a visiting spirit to whom mundane things of the mortal world would be of little interest. ‘How long have you been here, like this?’ Mary asked, her hand fluttering, indicating my other worldliness ... ‘Oh, I come and go,’ I answered. We spoke exactly the same language, Mary and I, both of us being of this world and not of this world. It’s all very mysterious, we both agreed.

When I was finally discharged I said goodbye to all my ward mates except Mary. I couldn’t bring myself to utter the finality. Mary had said I would return to her mind from time to time, and I told her I would never forget her. Mary Longbottom of Selby, Yorkshire. So why say goodbye?

(All photographs, except the last, by Victoria Kingsley-Pallant)

CARL GUSTAV IN MY GARDEN

Sometimes we hear the train, Dad and I, as we perambulate the length of the garden. Sometimes we  hear only wind. I see the tops of trees, ours, but not ours; they could be found anywhere, in any other clearing.

May is rounding out her month and soon June will be sent our way. Is your honeysuckle out? We have the scent of Syringha, planted for Shelagh...

I woke up this morning with a burning left eye, and now even after the sun has set, the rice is on the stove, and the song thrush is harmonising her final duets, I have the look of a badger about me.

Delftia some weeks ago, and now Klebsiella - ought I to take comfort in the strange fact that even my colonisations of bacteria have poetic names? My immunology nurse mentioned the word ‘strange’ over and over again. ‘These are strange times,’ she said. Strange, strange, strange.

My heart does funny loops and a bell is tolling like an echo in some distant yet ever near place. Do you hear this bell too? The Great Bell in Buddhism is a reminder to return to ourselves. This quieter bell seems more sinister, pulling us away from ourselves. To where?

I am reading Laurens Jan van der Post on his friend Jung. My dearest Colette sent me her copy of ‘Jung and the Story of our Time’. I feel I have already loosened the binding of this 1976 Penguin edition as I carry the book around with me, and move forward, and return to passages, and read aloud to Dad. ‘Hopkins! Schweitzer! Meister Eckehart!’ He hails these old friends as they are mentioned. Reading of the great ‘thuses of life’, what the fourteenth century Dominican mystic Meister Eckehart called istigkeit, the ‘isness’ of time and place, what Buddha called tathagata or ‘suchness’ - I am glad of mystery and the uncomfortable comfort of consciousness.

What are you reading now? And does it bring you comfort?

THE NAMES OF THINGS

Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes
gazes out at me, behind the window frame,
half content to be in Billy Collins’ world,
half wishing to be me;

cross-legged in the evening sun,
drinking rose petal tea.

I can name the Yellow Rose, the Frilly Poppy,
the Bee, longing for that same tea;
the half-eaten, bruised cherries,
the guzzling, drunken, blackbird feast.

Deep in the shadows, lazy snakes
of ivy curl, and the wind is a Tempest again.

I walk among the unnamed things,
the secret, hidden lives;
I pronounce the names of Latinate things,
and trip on the words and smile:

Cerastium tomentosum, snow in summer.
Gallium odoratum, stars in spring.
Lavendula angustifolia,
where the herb garden sings.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2020

Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes is the title of one of Billy Collins' poetry collections. He is one of my favourite poets, a playful and compassionate storyteller. Our cherry tree is slowly turning brown. If only the bright white blossom would last longer, but alas the winds have tumbled the petals down. These are slow times, which suit the person used to slowness (however much she may have fought the way it was forced upon her). I hope you are all coping with the pace newly forced upon you. I am determined to learn the names of things, which a poet really ought to know... but what else are we here to do, other than learn, forget, and promise ourselves we will learn again?  

FOOTSTEPS OF A MUNTJAC

From June to June I don't know who I am,

though I walk the old familiar paths, 

tracing and retracing into muscle and sinew

Who are you?

Who are you?

Who are you?

I am a Pokemon hunter

with chronic illness and no car, no invisibility 

cloak to protect me. 

I am a daughter, but not a mother.

I am a Queen of this, 

but not that.

I am a traveller who stays still for so long

she forgets she once walked 

among Inukshuk, and between redwoods. 

I am a reader who ceased to read.

Instead, I watch a bright screen move me

while my eyes and brain exchange 

the same, tired greeting

Here again?

Here again.

Here. Again.

A muntjac looked across the field 

at me, not trusting the scent of me.

We share this earth so cautiously. 

(c) Shaista Tayabali, 2020

prompt from Dverse Poets, ('What day is it anyway?'); image from Wildlife Watch: Forest of Dean

inspiration: my friend Helena, who walked in the garden with me, sunshine on our faces, muntjac footprints beneath our feet, and the wild world of hope blinking in the possibilities (Helena reminds me... I keep forgetting, am too tired, too sick, gripped by infections and fibromyalgia.) 

PICC LINES AND PENGUINS

Evening. The sun has set, I think. The day has faded away, and I haven't really paid attention. The twins left this morning en route to the airport and the next chapter of their life. I, who have been on a rollercoaster month of rocky infections, antibiotics and hospital admissions, feel jet lagged. Woozy with tiredness, I want to sleep for days without hours. But keeping time with the clock, they say, is important.

September is here. I had a birthday. My mother travelled to Vancouver to be with her two brothers at a wedding, and returned.

I had two PICC lines inserted and two PICC lines removed. Today was the removal of the second. My arm doesn't feel free yet. Still weighted with the memory of discomfort, it will take a while for the entry point wound to feel healed.

Other things will happen this month and the next. But until then I am going to crawl away and hibernate. Until then, here is a picture of me in Ellie's penguin hat, sitting, tube-free in the hospital Jubilee Garden...

BIRTHDAY TREATS AND RUINS

It's not like when you're 4 and you know exactly what you want your birthday cake to look like, or when you're 9 and you organise a fancy dress party with your cousin because you have a dress that makes your handcrafted wand look perfect, and she has the perfect magician's top hat… it's different now. But still, it's your birthday, so you try to find some magic.

Just around the corner from me, in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire…

At the entrance, some advice from George Bernard Shaw on birthdays… I'm afraid I disagree with you here, dear GB…

but ah! your writing shed…

Built around a central steep-pole frame, so Shaw could follow the arc of the sun's rays, it was dubbed 'London' by its bearded owner - unwanted visitors were kept away by being told he was 'visiting the capital'… we were therefore surprised to find a telephone above the typewriter, but suspected that was in lieu of a dinner gong - his wife, Charlotte, needing some way of calling her husband in from the land of words. In keeping with the irony of Shaw's instructions to a birthday girl, his house, a paean to Edwardian Arts-and-Crafts days, was closed for modern 'electricals', but the gardens were open and my friends had brought a picnic…

Across from Shaw, the Church of St Lawrence, somewhat newly ruined, and then twist through three kissing gates, take a selfie with sheep, and you arrive at the Apollonian influenced Greek revival church, built at the request of Sir Lionel Lyde, who decreed that 'what the church united in life, it should keep separate in death'. Interesting marriages, the Lydes and the Shaws!

The weather held, the sheep did not leap over the fence to knock the offending selfie-taker, my friends sang 'happy birthday' in church - where it sounded hallowed and melodious - and I even discovered a plaque commemorating a Lieut. Colonel Monier Williams, of the Honourable East India Company's Service, who was Surveyor General of Bombay; also of his son Alfred, ensign in the Grenadier Regiment Bombay Infantry, who fell, at 19, gallantly leading the Storm of The Pass of Nufoosk - a piece of Indian/British history I had never heard of. So I suppose you don't need to be 4 or 9 to enjoy your birthday - you just need the right friends.

BEWARE THE IDES

Somehow it is already the middle of March, the day that did not bode well for a certain Roman Emperor. What would Caesar make of his day of doom transforming into Mothering Sunday? Into cards and flowers and cups of tea, lovingly made…

Didn't the year only just begin? Was I really in India only a couple of months ago? I feel as though I am lagging behind my own world, and that I shall catch up with myself at some later date, later year.

My mother is painting the bannister and the doors with fresh coats of white paint. Yesterday I walked with my father at an impressive clip, his long strides eating up the overgrown grass of our garden, my feet scuttling to keep time with his. Nothing on the cherry tree, I pronounced. And today, suddenly, he informs me it is in bloom. Snowdrops and daffodils are enjoying their brief coincidental meetings in clusters around the path that leads from my little den to theirs.

For four months I have had a strange occurrence with new eyedrops dilating my pupils. I have mini cataracts in both my eyes too. Cataracts! Sometimes I don't know whose body this is that I am inhabiting. Sometimes I wonder what other shapes my life could have taken had I not destined myself for the writing life. Would I feel less distraught every time my eyes stumbled? How unimaginative I am that I cannot be anything but this addicted wordsmith for life.

But that's just this life. Next life, I shall return as Keeper of Hedgehogs or An Ambassador for Pandas. A Pambassador.

SECRET SCRIBE

Every colour on Turner's palette
walks past the scribe.

I am still, not quiet, in ochre
and my mother's five silver bangles -

but the one I wanted to write about
was the white dupatta

which seemed to float
with a life of its own

waving goodbye.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2015

I found a bench tucked into an arch of pink and white morning glories, and managed to scribe a few secret poems under Bangalore sky. When they say India has beautiful colours, they only say the truth. Today, at the hospital, I was back to the blue walls and shadows, but part of me was still cocooned a thousand miles away.

secret poem prompt via a Hyderabadi dverse poet

A Pheasant's Success

On the last day of March
a fat pheasant
strolls majestically
past the daffs
and half eaten tulips
matching the last
soft rays of the sun
tail for tale.

Belly warm
from freshly mown grass
he claims his part
of the garden.

I stake mine
by mellow English lilac
while the light fades
and my fingers
curl inwards
with cold.

Ring neck Pheasant with Daffodils, oil on panel, George Woodford

In the trail of a tree

When I am in the garden, time stands quiet and still. Dried leaves celebrate beneath my bare feet. Bees and flies examine me for size, for harm, and muscle in for some skin. I politely decline, and the scent of green guages invites them elsewhere.

I turn to the trees. Trees make me gracious. How strange to long to travel, and see and touch the new, and yet have loved the same trees, in the same patch of green, for sixteen years.

I have loved other trees, in another garden, in that other world I belonged to. The trees of before were loved differently though. Confidently, posessively, smugly - the way you love a thing you think will never leave you.

Trees know things. What do your trees tell you?