Lesson 1: The greenest field is the farthest away.
My Mother Margaret McNee was strikingly beautiful and came from a large family of Irish farmers. She had long auburn hair, worn in two plaits that she tied in circles around her ears. When she tired of that style, she was the first person in Whaley Bridge to have her hair cut into a bob. My Father disapproved. My Mother didn't care. I remember her voice serenading the whole house.
“Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling,” she would sing.
She had this lightness to her. An Irish lightness. It is almost as though every person from that small island is blessed with a sense of humour, and she had that too. She called our dog Airdale Woof, and she owned more shoes than you would have thought possible in the mid-1930s.
Sadly though, our time together was short.
When I was four years old, my mother became quite poorly. Tuberculous was a creeping disease in the 1930s. It started as a cough and then slowly progressed into something worse. She spent most of her time at the Sanitorium where people went to lay in the cool fresh air. There was no cure other than hope, as antibiotics were still twenty years away. She passed away at home while my Father was at work. I was playing in the other room when she finally left us.
How is a four-year-old to understand something so sad? How do you make sense of it?
I can not tell you how much I have longed for another conversation with my Mother, or just how far away she has felt from me for my entire life. I am ninety-one now. So much time has passed, yet she feels closer today, as if maybe that green field, which was far away on my four-year-old horizon, has moved ever so closer. I wonder what we will speak about when we meet again?
Let me tell you, the start of something, is always the most difficult.
It is true of everything, I think. The early years of practicing the piano were tiring, fraught, and full of error. My love of reading came after stumbling and tripping over difficult books for hours and hours. When we first got electricity in 1938, Uncle Law taught me how to fix a fuse until it was eventually burned into my circuits.
“This is how you do it, Sheila,” he said patiently. He showed me again and again. “There, you’ve got it,” he said.
Life is always difficult at the start, isn’t it?
So this is a story of my life, that you can jump around and read. I would like to share some things with you that I have learned, and also leave a little bit of my history should you wish to read it from time to time. I hope that it may inspire you to start something, to keep going, or to offer you some counsel during a hard moment in your own life. Maybe I can just remind you how special you are.
So let us begin.
The greenest field is always the farthest away…but you will get there if you start walking.
And walk we shall.
Lesson 2: What faults you see in me, take care to shun{t}. Friday, February 24th
Lesson 1: The greenest field is the farthest away.
Love the way this is starting, bud. Well done!
This was a lovely read. I can already tell I'm going to love this series! Just noticed the next one is already available. I'm off to read it! What important work you are doing!