As I walked up the stairs this morning, I looked out of the landing window and noticed that the stars were still visible. So I went back down again, into the dining room and out the door, pushing away the overgrowing branches of the fig tree – must cut that back, now the fruit is all finished. Out into the back garden. Pulled my dressing gown around me as I walked past the garden furniture and geranium pots towards the front of the house. The bamboo wind chimes tapped slowly, a single beat, repeated at a long interval, a hollow metronome. I passed under the archway and felt the wind blowing cold as I moved out of the shelter of the house. Heard the rustling in the dying leaves of the dying chestnut tree. Are all the chestnut trees going to die? Invest in conker futures – no, don’t joke about it. It is tragic, like so much else in this beautiful but doomed world.
Feet crunching on gravel, I walked past the front of the house, away from the amber street light, remembering dawn chorus day when I stood out here and listened, how many months ago? Five. So much has happened since then, and yet so little.
Round to the east side of the house, what we call the ‘back’ door, (to my son’s incomprehension, because that’s the one we always use). The drive, Hubby’s car. But I can’t go in that way because it’s locked, I will have to go back to the dining room. That’s OK.
I was looking for the sunrise, there isn’t a very attractive vista on this side of the house, the garden, drive, hedge, and then across the road more houses. The house immediately opposite has a light on in the bedroom window.
On the drive, away from the house and the trees, the view of the sky is more open. There they are, watching us, winking at us, of course they aren’t really, why should they care what happens to us? We are all in the gutter.
It has been a surreal week in blogland, even more so than usual. I find I’m being pulled into something strange and unpleasant, an interlocking of real life and blog life. I’m puzzled as to what I should say or think about all this. Keep well away, is my instinct. I refuse to judge and I refuse to take sides.
And yet, this whole idea of a distinction between ‘blog life’ and ‘real life’ is bizarre. We each have one life and one life only, the strands intertwine. Many of us (I was going to say, ‘all’, till I thought of Hubby) have fantasies which cannot be held to be entirely separate from the other strands, because they feed back into our feelings and actions, perhaps by sowing seeds of discontent. And yet, if the discontent wasn’t there to begin with, why would we turn to fantasy at all?
That Woman has apologised for making me feel guilty, and I accept her apology, though I can’t imagine how she could fail to anticipate the emotional effect on me of reading the thoughts of a betrayed husband. Am I really so unusual to feel that way?
Outside the window, the stars have gone now.