May Day

Today’s memory is from a year and a day after the previous one (a lot can happen in that time – in fairy tales, at any rate).

On the beach at sunrise with a smallish group of friends and friends-of-friends, one of them a Pagan celebrant who led us in a ceremony of welcome to the sun on May Day morning. I remember chanting, facing in the four directions (towards the sea, the land, the sun and… towards the pier? -it’s all I can think of in that direction!) There was also singing, djembe banging, some mandolin playing, probably dancing and definitely consumption of brandy supplied by her partner (not something I normally do at six in the morning, not even on May Day!) And breakfast in the Beach Café.

Thinking back, I realise I hardly ever see that group of people any more. When the world passed around the sun again, I had entered the year of my own personal self-isolation, of chemo and surgery and radiotherapy, and when I emerged from that into 2018, it seemed as though everyone’s life had changed, not just mine, the dance had shifted, we had all taken up new positions and our paths no longer intersected – except sometimes on Facebook, repository of friendships and social medium of choice for my generation.

That wasn’t the only memorable thing that happened that May Day, however. When I got home to the flat, I had an email from my ex husband, saying that he’d received and provisionally accepted an offer on the old family home; obviously my formal agreement was needed, but that was hardly in doubt. The beginning of the real end of that chapter of my life, a summer of driving up and down between here and there, clearing out everything, including the attic where so much of my past had accumulated; helping him initially to move into his new place in Bedford (and in the interim our son and his fiancée from their tiny studio flat in Guildford to a two-storey maisonette), and finally, in October, moving into this house, with one van of stuff transported professionally from the flat, and another trip for me up to Bedford, another rented van loaded and driven down by my daughter’s partner, another drive back southwards in my Micra with another terrified cat in a basket on the passenger seat.

If I’d known on that spring morning that it would be almost another six months before I was finally settled in my own home… well, I don’t know what I would have done. But it happened, all the dusty accumulation of the past, the physical stuff and the emotional clutter which had haunted me, all moved, all resolved, and here I was.

Maybe the stress of that year contributed to my body’s next bombshell – who knows? But I got through that too. And here I stand, and every day, whether May Day or any one of 365 others, the future still knocks on my door.