Pastures new

It is a beautiful evening - but more like early autumn than a nascent August. The recent dry spell has really pole-axed the garden, and everything is spent with no freshness to it, and a month ahead of its usual cycle. The light is magical though, bathing everything in a soft yellow glow, a harbinger of mellow days to come.

It is hard to believe just how quickly yet another year is passing in which I have lived alone, and still without the final resolution to all the ever-present unpleasantness.

However, I do feel that within the next six months, everything will settle down. In a funny way, the two years that have passed in limbo, have made me realise that it is time to start a new life, and move on. I have loved this house and garden with a passion, a mantra oft repeated here, but I cannot continue to maintain it, both physically and financially, and so now feel ready to move on to a new stage in my life. In fact, I would welcome it.

An opportunity to reflect, to run the gamut of a tangle of mixed emotions, a chance to re-evaluate, to surgically examine a failed relationship, many people do not have that luxury. Often marriages fracture seismically, with no warning like an earthquake, and how much harder that must be to cope with than the situation in which I found myself, where I was the instigator of the break - and the other party continued to behave so badly, and refused to settle, and thus gave me time to really decide that the marriage was well and truly over.

Yes, I have had time to reflect on the past 45 years. There were many good times at the beginning, and little things keep nudging and rising up in my mind - it is impossible to spend your whole adult life with someone, and then forget everything you shared together. I suppose the most difficult thing is to realise that most of the things that I remember and once enjoyed, were not mutual. Every single day aomething jogs my memory - a tune, a smell, a photograph, a book, a classic car racing past me in the country lane near my home, all lost in a fog, a mist of incomprehension that what meant so much to one person in a marriage mattered not one jot to the other partner. Everything airbrushed from history.

Notwithstanding, I have had a good life, and had many experiences, travelled widely meeting many interesting people, so no regrets on that score.

Today, a kind friend on loan from his understanding wife, came to give me another lesson on my computer. I am slowly learning all manner of good things - I have almost mastered properly the art of inserting my photos on my blog, {instead of the senior daughter coming to the rescue!) He also unblocked the filter on my washing machine and dismantled my large, ripped and very dishevelled garden umbrella - what will I do when I move from this village? Everyone is so kind. On to pastures new.