Threading Time
I was walking the dog this morning and remembering a visit to the fabulous Verdant Works museum in Dundee. It is a living place that echoes with the voices of women above the clanking of machines.
The Dundee I remember is very different from the place it is now; it seems smaller. My great-gran, great-aunt, gran and mum all worked in Dundee’s jute industry, and my gran stood in the front row fighting for equal rights.
The photo shows my gran and my mum walking down the High Street during my gran’s first-ever paid holiday, looking like film stars. When did people stop dressing well?. She used to chide me for being scruffy, if she could see the dresses in my wardrobe now.....
My gran was a seamstress. When I stayed with her in the flat in Corso Street, Blackness—in the days before the University of Dundee swallowed up the area, when Anderson shelters were used as sheds and impromptu trampolines—I used to thread the needles for her machine, something I can sympathise with now. It was a beautiful machine, and I went to sleep listening to the sound of its motor making someone’s life better or helping their dreams come true.
She used to bathe me in the kitchen sink, and I loved looking down at the gardens at the back and pretending I was in a boat. She talked about her history, and I have those stories wrapped up in a sewing box in my heart.
There is only one other person I have met with whom I felt that same affinity. We chose a bag for her from the museum shop that day. She never saw that bag, and it now sits beside the sewing box, filled with the last time I saw her.
Love and loss are as natural and devastating as the forces that shape the world around us. It is a skill that cartographers capture in their art, the tearing and reforming of the earth and the power in water to sustain our lives and shape our world.
Grief breaks and scours, like glaciers and glacial lakes and like my healing heart, landscapes shaped by glacial activity have ridges and stones that legend says were formed by giants fighting, and a fertile beauty that makes space for the next generation.
It put me in mind of the poem 'Afterlife' from my upcoming book of poetry 'Nebula', from the trilogy 'Travelling Alone'.
Afterlife
I want to go home,
I want to be a consciousness,
A gathering,
A murder of existence.
I want to move through the universe,
Playing hide and seek in Saturn’s rings,
Playing knock-knock ginger with satellites,
Surfing on the tails of comets.
I want to be the sunlight on your face,
The breeze that crosses your arm,
The voice that speaks from deep inside you,
The soil at your fingertips.
