Striking a chord

How funny it is when, writing a post in a choleric mood, it strikes a chord. When I let fly about the weird behaviour of prospective buyers of my house, I felt a little ashamed and assumed that I would create a backlash.

Well, dear readers, you have surpassed yourselves with your comments. How very gratifying.

However, I am still in a state of limbo with regard to the sale of my home - we are approaching the year mark since the house went on to the market, and as yet no serious offers.

Pursuing the cup half full rather than half empty theory, at least I have had the chance to live in my beloved house in the ordered way denied to me whilst I was married. It is a fact that for years I functioned well below par, surviving my toxic marriage cruising just below the surface of reality. Numbing down rather than dumbing down, if you will excuse the excruciating pun.

In the first year of my blessed release, I felt energised, free, able to breathe the fresh air of normality. I did not miss my husband at all, I did not miss the mess and disorganisation, the empty cereal packets thrown on the larder floor, the empty milk bottles abandoned on the larder window sill, the sink full of washing up after I had been on a day out or a trip away, the clothes on the bedroom floor even though he had his own dressing room, the long absences on 'business' trips, the odd phone calls, the suspicions, the sourness, the disinterest in me as a human being, the rank smell of a rotting relationship. To be fair, he did sometimes buy flowers for me on my return home. I will never fathom what went on in his mind.

He paid my maintenance, and for the first time, I could maintain and run the home in the ordered way previously denied to me. Then, he stopped the maintenance, destroyed me in Court, and my troubles began.

However, recently, after months of private misery, which did indeed spill out into the open on occasion, I have come to realise that my wise friends are right, and it is time to move on, and wash that man right out of my hair.

I hsve begun to make some new friends locally, I feel I can hold my head up, I am beginning to make this new life that is continually recommended to me. I know that the disintegration of any relationship is rarely the fault of one person, but I will never forgive my ex-husband for his crusade to ruin me.

I really do have some wonderful loyal and loving friends, and for this I am grateful.

Today - I walked round the bruised battered garden, which was just beginning to lift its head after the harshest winter in years. There were bright white clumps of snowdrops, bright yellow aconites, forsythia sprays just beginning to break bud, fresh green shoots of some of the perennials pushing through the spent and dry earth, how glorious it looked.

Later when I took Maud and Billy on their daily walk, I picked a large bunch of pussy willow, powdery catkins and glossy ivy with fat black berries. I remembered that last year I had written about the fat powdery catkins - here we are again, another year, a new Spring, and another year down the road to recovery. Please forgive me if I repeat myself.

Carpe Diem.