UPDATE

Last year in the summer, I was drawn back to my childhood home. It is a village in Lincolnshire, England. My grandparents had a farm out in the countryside beyond the village, but my grandmother often used to take me into the village with her, to take food and various other things to people who needed them. We would walk together, I just a very little girl, down the long road into the village. Often it was very hot, and as we were walking up the hill, back to the farm, I felt that I would faint from the heat.

I was born in that village, but my parents left there when I was about two years old. We then moved around England a lot – every three to six months. However, I regularly returned to my grandparents’ farm to stay for a while. They were the happiest days of my life. The farm and the village became my only real “home.” My only security. Though much of my life was with my parents, traipsing around the country, which I hated, and which made me a very insecure person for a while.

After having cancer, from which I almost died, and being left blind and wheelchair bound, I was drawn back to that childhood place. It was as if I was trying to reclaim myself again. Cancer changes you. I did not know who I was any more, now being blind and wheelchair bound, and totally dependent upon others for even the smallest thing. Adjusting was hard. It still is, as my health continues to deteriorate, and I was SHOCKED to the core when some people, notably clergy, told me only the other week that I needed to go into a HOME! I am not elderly. My husband and I just about manage. My home is HERE, where I am now, with my husband. We both sank into the most horrible fear, thinking that the issue could be forced. However, we have discovered how to make it so that this cannot happen. I am naturally a very lively, confident and outgoing person, with LOTS of interests and a brain that never stops! So to go into a Home would KILL me. Plus, I have my beloved dog, a beautiful rough (Lassie type) collie called Hope. She is only three years old, and I love her, and she loves me.

But I have digressed.

I went back to my childhood home in the summer of 2017 to try and find myself again. I sat for hours, in the car, outside the village church where I was baptised. There, as I sat, I had many experiences. I went through all the emotions under the sun. I cried a lot, and I laughed a lot.

I longed to go back there to live, and to re-acquaint myself with the place, and get to know people whose names I knew but had never met. So then began a quest to find somewhere to live, there. So far we have been unsuccessful, and my health is deteriorating badly again, so I don’t know if we ever will get to live there. I needed to reclaim my happiness again. To stop being a Wanderer. To become rooted in a place where I had been truly happy.

My cancer had left me a very different person. In many ways a much much stronger one, but also so very very vulnerable. My emotions go all over the place at times, as may be evident in my poetry.

However, whilst I was sitting there, in the car, by the side of the church, i was under a rowan tree, which inspired me greatly. I wrote my third poetry book called “Under the Rowan Tree.” It is not available from anywhere, though some people have asked where they can get it. I sell it at Craft Fairs when I am well enough. But that is not why I am writing this piece. I am writing it to say that I still go back to sit there, under the rowan tree, and feel the different seasons. We are approaching winter now. And as I sit I re-live my memories, and try to make sense of things. I intend to post much more about this, and some of the poems that have come out of doing this.

So, that is just a little bit of an explanation of where I am at. Sometimes my poems etc are full of hope etc but sometimes they are very dark. Both are as true as each other.

Thankyou to all of my Followers and many others who just stop by, for reading my stuff. It means the world to me.

Lorraine x