Newsletter

This newsletter has been running now for just over a year, and writing it once a month sets me happily on some sort of a conveyor that turns the year—at least in my mind’s eye. I see a clock, a belt, a current, perhaps gears rotating, one tooth meshing neatly into the next—January to February—31st to the 1st. Moving things on.

I wonder what 2019 will bring?

“Stay in the day,” some say. Don’t take the whole year at a time, a whole life at a time. “Keep your head where your feet are,” others advise, which simply means live in the present, this twenty-four hours, and trust that the rest will take care of itself—“one day at a time.”

Recently, when I was describing to a friend the numerous challenges currently facing my family and myself, she rejected the metaphor I’d just used, saying, “No, not a car pile up, more like a jewelry box – with all those lovely pieces you just toss in that can’t do anything else but over time get tangled up.

Having just returned from the USA, and the wonders of “home” and family there, I remain amazed by the emotions it has stirred up in me. It has been almost four years since my last trip back, and that was to be there for my father’s passing.

October! How many times in my American grade school was that capital O fashioned into a grinning jack-o’-lantern? October was Hallowe’en and, being celebrated on the 31st, it drove the month. Who were you going to be on the night?

It’s autumn here in Oxford, with its dew-drenched roses, misty mornings and windows firmly closed at night. “Fresh” is the word the British use to describe this time of year, and fresh it is. For me, September heralds in a “New Year” of sorts.

August to me means real summertime: dog days and a holiday stretch of beach. Most of my summer breaks over the years have been spent on one, even if it was only a lake with a sandy shore rather than the ocean. My mother was a beach person and so in turn her children became beach people.

Any mention of July to me always conjures up one day in the month in particular: the 4th of July, with its fireworks celebrating America’s Independence Day. Even if I have not lived in the US for close to twenty years and in fact now make my home in England, the country from which the fledgling US Congress in 1776 sought separation at any cost, this particular commemorative date has never lost its significance for me. American Independence was only won after great sacrifice. Not only the US and England paid a hefty price, but France and Spain too paid handsomely. The toll in lives lost is thought to have been proportionally greater than the number lost in the Civil War.

To me, June means Father’s Day. FATHER’S DAY writ large, that is. With a bigger- than-life father like mine, who could ever forget it? What do you give a man, a large man, a military man, who definitely does not want socks, ties or golf clubs of any size or description?

In May I think of lily of the valley—muguet, as they say in France, where as a young child I was first introduced to this sweet-smelling flower. Of the upright stem, with its two bright green, broad leaves and up to fifteen white, miniature bells, I was told that each one sprang up where Mary, Queen of Heaven, placed her foot.