Yesterday morning I took the cat to the vet’s for a ‘Senior Wellness check’. This used to be called a ‘Senior Health check’ and I couldn’t help imagining them burning aromatherapy candles, playing soothing music and maybe giving her a back massage. I had to drop her off at the surgery because of current lockdown conditions, and wait till they called me back to come and collect her. Because of the blood tests she wasn’t allowed anything to eat after ten the night before, which usually means pleading looks until it’s time to go, but in fact she just stayed out of the way, and when it was time to go allowed me to pick her up and put her in the basket with no struggles or complaints. In fact, she was unnaturally subdued, and still is this morning. When I collected her, the nurse asked if she could take her home to teach her own cat a lesson in manners, which is a far cry from this time last year when I dropped her off and went to the Co-op, then got a phone call from the vet asking for permission to sedate her because she was kicking up such a fuss.
She’s getting old. We all get old and resigned to the way things are. I guess that’s the way I’m feeling at the moment – except when I’m in a panic over something or other. Lockdown lethargy.
On my desk there’s an oyster shell. I don’t know where it came from – well, the beach, obviously, and before that in the sea, wrapped around an oyster. But how did it come to be on my desk? My house is full of oyster shells, and ‘interesting’ pebbles, picked up from beach walks. But this one in particular… I don’t know – it must have fallen out of a box of ‘stuff’ or something. I don’t know what it is about oyster shells – I used to think they were ugly, not like the pretty little scallops, rosy pink and smaller than my thumbnail, or the slipper limpets with their oddly shaped cavity. They are rough and monochrome and no two are ever alike, but if you turn them over and the light catches in just the right way, sometimes the gleam of mother-of-pearl will take you by surprise. I used that image in my poem ‘Beachcomber’. The document on my computer has it as:
The shimmer of an oyster shell,
Linda Rushby July 2015
Like tears for a lost pearl.
That’s funny – I could have sworn I used ‘gleam’. Maybe I changed it. Poems are not immutable. But when I check the book, I find that I published it as:
‘Oyster shells shimmer
‘Beachcombing‘, Linda Rushby April 2016
Like tears for a lost pearl.
Well well well. That scans better, and it has the alliteration too, but I still like ‘gleam’, it has a lovely sound.
Which reminds me, someone bought a copy of ‘Beachcombing’ from Amazon last year, the first time it’s sold other than sales I’ve made in person.