The dog has taken to sleeping on the bed, pushed up hard against me leaving no space while she sprawls at all angles, snoring loudly.
I always said she’d never be allowed on the bed but her life is short.
It disturbs my sleep but rising early in these warm mornings I soon shrug it off.
We walk through the fields and trees, and she runs towards the water until I hear the telltale splash as she swims past the reeds and into the inky distance.
This year, perhaps like no other, it has felt as if the spring and summer would go on forever.
My sister turned sixty this week and it’s a landmark she wasn’t anxious to reach.
I made her some scones, jam and a ginger cake so she could have a special tea on her birthday.
“I ate far too much but I’m sixty so I can do what I want,” she tells me.
There have to be compensations for getting older.
She says it was particularly lovely because the last time she had a cream tea was with our mother the year that she died.
“Talking of mum, do you remember those bathers she knitted for you?”
I show her a photo where she is paddling in the sea at Camber Sands wearing a knitted one-piece swimming costume in blue and white stripes. She has a broad smile on her face and a life set before her.
“Oh, I’d forgotten all about that. You had one too, didn’t you?” she says
“I did. Knitted swimwear, can you imagine how heavy it was when we got wet? Perhaps she was trying to drown us?”
In every photo from my childhood the sky is cloudless and the beach wider than it’s possible to imagine.
The tide was always out, and now it’s coming in.
Of course, from those days there are no pictures of unhappiness even though I have many memories of shouting, slamming doors, and frightening uncertainty. To an extent, we choose the perspective we take on the past and the future.
The people who struggle most with anxiety are often the ones who have already come through a lot worse than they fear might befall them.
Camus wrote about the feeling he had an invincible summer inside him. He said that however hard the world pushed against him, there was something inside pushing back.
After my sister’s birthday, the weather turned and the rain and muddy paw prints on the carpets were a reminder of what is to come in the months that sit just around the corner.
Even the mornings are beginning to smell more like autumn, and the leaves are piling up on the step blown in through the gate which still doesn’t open despite my undertaking to fix it.
The tomato plants I brought back from the brink after they withered in the spring heatwave have grown well, but they are running out of time to ripen the fruit that hangs heavily from their limbs.
No matter. If they remain green we’ll make chutney from them and we will be reminded of an invincible summer.
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