Behind the Tapestry

It’s been quite a week. By the time you read this, it will be June, but for now, it’s 1 o’clock in the morning on Saturday 23^rd May and I can’t sleep. Having spent several fruitless hours thinking calming thoughts, praying and mentally rearranging my cerebral furniture, I realised that yet again, a piece of written work was bouncing around my skull shouting, “Don’t go to sleep! Get up and write all that stuff down before you forget it.” So I am.

One of my favourite novels is, “The House of Mirth” by Edith Wharton. I can only bear to read it about every three years since it is so desperately sad and poignant. It’s a great piece of writing, chronicling the slow and inexorable slide down the social ladder of the heroine, the beautiful and self-sabotaging Lily Bart. As the novel progresses, she finds herself acting as a social companion to a much-divorced lady. From this new perspective, she sees the machinery behind the stage, a shadowy social hinterland where naïve and rich young men form relationships with married women and dodgy deals are done. Here’s the sentence that always hits the spot for me. “Lily had an odd sense of being behind the social tapestry, on the side where the threads were knotted and the loose ends hung.”

From the first moment I read those words, they resonated with me. It seems to me that we all weave a tapestry and it is human nature to want to show the “good” side, where there are no dropped stitches or clashing colours. It takes courage to let anyone see our knotted threads and loose ends. And yet without that place, the messy middle as Abby King puts it, there is no tapestry.

In the interests of authenticity (one of my favourite words), therefore, let me share with you some of the highlights of my action-packed week. Last month, I came up with the concept of open brackets and revealed that I had dropped dried yeast into my laptop. Even now, I am still suffering from a sticky letter d which makes typing an an and rather difficult.

It would be easy for me to burble on about planting my hanging baskets, watering the garden, painting my plant pots a soothing shade of green, supporting and encouraging my children in their school work and baking bread each sunny morn. And I have done all those things this week. It may be that the bread actually makes it into the oven in the dusky eventide, rather than the sunny morn, but we won’t quibble.

Here then are a few of my knotted ends and loose threads from the previous seven days.

On Monday, I received a quite unexpected and hugely encouraging compliment on my writing out of the blue. This made me feel extremely happy. My husband and I spent the day pottering about in the garden and every so often, he would repeat the compliment to me and we would beam at each other. Since lock down began, every evening at around 6 o’clock, one of us will remark that the sun is over the yard arm and that we might therefore think about having an aperitif. We pour two home-made rhubarb gins with ginger ale (fruit and veg, sort of), sip them with great appreciation, have dinner and chill with the children. That’s usually enough for me.

However, on this particular evening, I felt that celebration was in order. I accepted a large glass of white wine. There was much jollity and laughter and I confess that I became slightly over-refreshed. Ambling upstairs to bed, I recalled that I have a tendency to snore quite loudly when wine has been taken. In the top drawer of my bedside cabinet lives a pair of Body Shop moisturising gloves which I forget to wear nearly every night. There are also three small bottles of essential oils, which sprinkled on a surface (a Body Shop moisturising glove, say) are supposed to clear the sinuses and prevent nocturnal noises.

The light was out, but I could feel the little glass bottles. One by one, I shook a few drops on to the glove. Did I mention that my duvet cover is white? A pleasant smell of lavender drifted up to my nose, until I opened bottle number three and shook it lavishly on to the glove. Something was wrong. I only found out what that something was when I turned on the light and discovered that I had been emptying my Mother’s Day present, a bottle of bright red nail varnish, over the glove. No, it didn’t come out in spite of my best efforts. Never mind. I simply turned the cover over. Now you can’t see the stains.

That was Monday.

On Thursday, Fran Hill had her virtual book launch of, “Miss, What Does Incomprehensible Mean?”. I was very excited. I spent the day in the garden, potting, painting, planting and lugging heavy pots around. By 6 o’clock, I was hot, sweaty and grimy, had a lump of congealing green paint in my hair and earth in my eyes due to a replanting issue. I showered, washed the paint out and selected a favourite dress from my wardrobe. It’s a charity shop buy, a black and white maxi-dress. I really like it. With half an hour to go to the launch, I began to climb the stairs, carrying a small plate of cheese, bread and a particularly fine and fruity chutney I made last year.

At the turn of the stairs, I caught my foot in the hem. Everything happened in a flash. My plate left my hand and sailed, frisbee-like, into my eldest son’s room, scattering goats’ cheese, bread crumbs and sultanas everywhere. I wasn’t far behind, airborne for a few brief seconds until my flight was abruptly terminated by my head hitting the door frame at top speed.

Imagine the scene. A middle-aged Christian writer in a black and white maxi-dress lying on her front, gazing at cheese and saying, “Ow, ow, ow,” to herself, over and over again. After a few minutes, I arose and picked most of the cheese out of the carpet. Head throbbing, I reclined on the bed waiting for Fran to go live. The book launch was fantastic. By 11 o’clock I was more than ready for bed.

I was just on the point of sleep when I became aware of a presence in the room. It wasn’t my husband, who was slumbering next to me. I heard the faintest of papery whispers, raised my hand to my head and brushed something off it, something which landed on the carpet with a thud. I couldn’t hear buzzing, so I knew it wasn’t a wasp, fly or hornet. I decided to ignore whatever it was and go to sleep.

The next morning, I awoke to a sore head and a cricked neck under my red and white duvet. Walking very carefully across the stairs to the loo, I glanced up and saw the most enormous stag beetle on the lampshade. This had been my uninvited visitor. If you haven’t met one before, please see the picture below.

When the younger children woke up, I recounted my tale. There were cries of horror as they gazed up at the slumbering insect. I masterminded its removal remotely, from the safety of my bed. With the aid of a plastic cup, a long-handled mop and my draft novel notes, the intrepid duo hurled it out of the window.

Next, my eldest son stalked in and said accusingly, “I found a raisin in my bed this morning! That’s your fault.” It was, although in fact, the fruit in question was a sultana.

Surely, I said to myself, surely this week can bring no more painful accidents or stain-worthy errors. I cycled to my parents, wearing the maxi-dress which got tangled up in my chain not once, not twice, but thrice. Upon arrival, I started feeding their tortoise. I took my eye off the ball for a nano-second and it mistook my finger for a strawberry. I don’t know if you’ve ever been bitten by a tortoise, but it blooming hurts. Taking the lettuce and cucumber back into the kitchen, I caught my hair on a long, sticky fly paper which I myself had put up the day before.

My knotted ends and loose threads have gone to making me the person I am today. Each challenge, each mistake, each regret has added another loop to my picture.

So, to recap. My white duvet is now streaked with red. I’ve got a huge sore patch on my head and my neck is cricked. I’ve been buzzed by giant insects and bitten by a reptile. My hair is full of goo. This very morning while editing, a vast hornet the size of a minivan with wings flew into the bedroom and had to be chased out.

Why I am telling you this? Because I believe it needs to be told. Yes, it’s funny, and I have deliberately erred on the side of humour. However, these are the kind of things which must be recounted if my tapestry is to make any sense.

Reading Wendy’s blog on 1^st June, I was reminded that even things we don’t expect (being sprinkled by an over-enthusiastic watering neighbour in her case) make it into our notebooks or our memory banks for later use. Life is copy, as I often say.

A few days ago, I heard that Microsoft are replacing some of their writers with robots. I think that’s a terrible idea. Robots don’t trip on the stairs and hurl cheese everywhere. Neither do they get buzzed by stag beetles, bitten by tortoises or walk into fly papers. The whole point of writing, surely, is to share our humanness, our brokenness, our highs and lows.

 

God instructed Moses thus in Exodus 17:14: “Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered ….” So I have. It may not seem like much in the grand scheme of things, but I may well look back on my week and learn something from it. Whatever our scrolls are, notebooks, the backs of envelopes or laptops, there is always something to be written down which is worth remembering.

What’s yours?

Images by Pixabay

Ruth is a freelance writer, speaker and poet. She is married with three delightful children, runs a catering company and keeps chickens and quail. She has her first novel in the editing stage, another two on the go, writes poetry as the mood takes her, writes for a number of Christian charities and has her own business writing blogs for small Suffolk businesses. She blogs at @bigwordsandmadeupstories, covering topics as diverse as King Zog of Albania, a Christingle plagued by punch-ups and tummy upsets, and the inevitable decline of elderly parents.