Call Me Mother

Heasandford Green, a beautiful place which refreshes my soul during every visit, had a previous existence as an open-cast mine.  This was a fact which was brought to my attention (and utter amazement) by a local who had known it as such during his childhood.

Relishing my surprise verging on disbelief, he showed me photographs of the pit as it had been – sixty years previously.

Bringing livelihood to the local area (alongside dreadful lung and other diseases and hazards), the industrial wound and scar of Bank Hall was essential to the local economy and gave no forewarning of the beautiful place of tranquility, healing and restoration which it would become.

Still bringing wealth to the local area in its contribution to the health and wellbeing of the community, Bank Hall has been deliberately subsumed by the phoenix of Heasandford Green.

Lancashire, however, is not the only place where wisdom and vision have combined to ensure that a phoenix has been permitted to rise.

On a recent visit to South Wales, I was taken to visit “The Keeper of the Collieries”.

Set in the valleys against a back drop of drifts of flowers, trees and mountains interspersed by streams and rivers, The Keeper watches.

Created from oak, irrefutable skill and vision, The Keeper observes, unblinkingly, those who once worked where he now stands and their descendants.

Marking the past and pointing to the future, The Keeper stands amidst community orchards, walkways and cycle paths watching and  and waiting as the valleys stir again.

Simply stunning…

Sunny and dry days arriving in concert with my daughter’s latest A-level Textiles project have taken me back to a nostalgic and idyllic recollection of childhood.  Bliss!

I grew up in a small market town in a traditional farming area of rural Suffolk at a time when there was no internet, no computers, a slightly-more-frequent than weekly bus service and a marked absence of multi-car households.

Shops closed for half days at Wednesday lunch time, there was one tiny local supermarket and nothing – whatsoever – opened on Sundays.  (Sundays were a hallowed Sabbath.)  Market days occurred twice per week and were as much a social and community event as an economic one.

Livestock was brought into town for sale to butchers and we, innocent children, used to visit cows, pigs and sheep en-route to our plates without knowledge or appreciation of the imminent connection!

High days and holidays were celebrated as community events with ox roasts in the market square as a traditional occurrence, along with dancing around the may pole –in season- and the inevitable appearance of morris dancers, processions and (high excitement!) the advent of majorettes with twirling batons and high stepping finesse.

At my rural primary school, one of the lessons learnt was the identification, retrieval and use of plants to make natural dyes.

Decades later, that knowledge is still useful and proved its worth in my daughter’s creation of a cave.  (The saga of that is a blog for another occasion!)

As we retrieved, discussed and experimented with the dyeing properties of common plants – often identified as weeds – and, also exotic spices, the pleasure and restorative properties, possible to obtain from the simplicity of life, enthralled us.

Useful, harmless, interesting, entertaining and creative knowledge shared and developed.

Wonderful!

Walking my dogs early every morning remains one of the numerous pleasures of my life and enables me, as you know, to discover all manner of interesting and extraordinary sights in the neighbourhood, in the local park and on the beach.

This month, my visual scrapbook has been inundated with particularly unusual sights ranging from bulbs, shrubs and trees which believe that it is May or June through the dramatic cordoning off and police sentry duty of a postbox to the closure of the local petrol station.

Having been drenched to the skin several times in one morning (Thank you, Doris!), I was staggered to witness the roof of the local petrol station perched at an improbable angle.  More cordoning off resulted and – as the site is located opposite the desperately understaffed and infrequently “opened-for-active-business” police station – Doris’s thoughtfulness was not lost on us!

Miraculously, no-one was injured and all was back to normal within days.  Compared with the tragedies which unfolded elsewhere we were very blessed.

Interesting drama, yes.  Crisis and chaos, no.

Wonderful!