In a few more days it will be All Hallows and Samhain. The festivals are on a specific day that has an astrological precision of being halfway between the autumn equinox and winter solstice, but they also represent a season. The trees are now in their full autumn colour; and those that shed their leaves early, like birch, have bare twigs. The days are much shorter and that curious ritual of changing the clocks has arrived.
My house move is getting close now, only a little over a month to go. My books are all packed in boxes (except for a selection that I’m still reading, I usually have about half a dozen on the go at the same time). This weekend I’ll make a start on packing up the non-book things.
I’ve also been shifting my life in other ways. My employer has been very supportive. I’ve been able to take flexible retirement, reducing my work time by one day a week and also giving up my office to work from home with a hot desk for when I need to come in for meetings and so on. This is not totally altruistic on their part – I’ll probably do the same amount of work in four days as in five, and office space is always at a premium. But I’ve also explained that the liberated non-workday is for creative writing, and they’ll need to respect the fact that I’ll be switching off my laptop and ‘phone. Having a day completely away from the internet is going to be an important part of the transition, it’s been affecting my attention span as I’m in a constant state of anticipation for the next email or news event.
The other shift has been geographical. I’ve been going to the upper Dales as often as I can and have joined a community group. I went to an exercise class with the group this week so that I can start getting to know people and begin the journey to fitness. It is a different world in the upper Dales. I remember being told by a friend of going into the kitchen of Dales farmer and noticing that the kitchen clock was an hour out and being told “Ah, but you see, we can’t change the clocks because the cows do not know about daylight time saving”.
Samhain is the time when cattle were brought down from mountain pastures ready for winter and to be fed on the hay that was gathered during the summer. It’s also the time when doors open between worlds and souls can revisit the living. The way that lost friends and relatives remain with us is beautifully expressed in the ‘Miss You’ poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, here are a few lines; I’ve put a link at the end of the blog if you’d like to read the whole poem:
Do not care if you bring only your light body.
Would just be so happy to sit at the table
and talk about the menu. Miss you.
As I pack my possessions ready for the move, I’ll need to pack the belongings of my sister, who died when I was a child, and which were saved by my parents for all these years. They never reconciled their grief and now decades later I need to open and reconcile mine. I’ve kept my sister’s things, but haven’t yet been able to confront the emotions they contain. It’s something I intend to do when I move to my new house deep in the Dales and do my best to put it into words. In the meantime, I’ll start by setting a place at the table for her at Samhain so that she can at last visit and share some supper with me.
Rowan on the Moor
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Link to one of Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s Miss You poems.
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