Smudger Snippets
Created | Updated Sep 10, 2008
I suppose it's because I have so much time on my hands these days, that all these memories come flooding back to me.
My Sanctuary
It was that time of day just when the sun was setting, and I could hear the birds chirping their farewell to the day, and apart from that there were no other sounds. No dog barking from next door, no noisy kids from my other neighbour, running around screaming like they had been for most of the day. It was that short period of time of peace and quiet that I have come to call 'my' time, and it's ever so relaxing. I open up the summer house, the one I built a few years ago for my wife so that she could spend time in the garden away from the blustery wind, as that can take her breath away. She was diagnosed with having emphysema a few years ago, and we have both learned to accept it and changed our lifestyle to cope with it. That summer house has come to be my small sanctuary, a place were I go at the end of the day, roll a cigarette and sit on the porch area that I built so we could be outside the summer house, yet still sheltered from the wind. It's a really peaceful time of day for me, just to sit there and feel the last blast of heat that the sun throws out before it disappears over the horizon. The weird thing is, that even tough I built it for my wife, she very rarely uses it, and when she does, it's never for long, as she is not all that keen on the sun, and always complains of getting too hot, so she goes back indoors, leaving me sitting there, soaking up the rays.
It's a great wee place to sit and watch the grandchildren as they run around the garden, chasing each other while they play hide and seek between the other two sheds we have in our back garden. I often watch them play and wonder what the future will have in store for them, as I think back to the days when I was their age, and life was ever so different and so innocent then. I don't know if it's just the fact that I am so relaxed and enjoying the peace and quiet, when hundreds of memories come flooding back into my mind, or is it that I have an open mind that allows them all to come rushing in at the same time. I see faces of people long gone now, that are so vivid I could reach out and touch them. People who played an important part in my life back then. Of course I think about things like that during the day, but I seem to have more time to soak up these memories in at that time of the day, it gives me more time to appreciate their presence. A sudden smile will appear on my face as a humorous event from way back will come into my head. In fact so many come flooding back that I can easily drift away into another world altogether, a world that I left behind all those years ago. I feel safe in there, in a way that is really hard to describe.
It's a bit like when we ran our Bed and Breakfast business which we started to try and hang on to my house after the divorce. I had to mortgage the house in order to pay the settlement part of the divorce and we started the business as a joint venture in the hope of earning a living. We had a summer house in that garden as well, and it was the only meeting place my wife and I had at that time. It was a large house with seven bedrooms, and to be honest, we never saw much of each other throughout a typical day. So we set aside a period between 10.30am and 11.00am every day to sit out in that summer house and plan our day. We were really busy during the summer months, we even got calls from Australia and the USA; from folk who had stayed with us and told their friends about us when they returned to their own country.
There were no written rules in our house, and that made it more homely and welcoming to all our guests. Looking back on it all now we did have some really good times and a lot of fun running the business, even though the hours were long and the work demanding. Yet we had our health and our determination to be a success in order to hang on to the house that I had worked so hard for all those years working away from home, which ironically was the cause of the divorce in the first place. We did manage to keep it all going for two and a half years, but the winters were long and the bills kept coming, so it was with a heavy heart that we decided to call it a day before we lost everything. Yet those summer house meetings we had where I would have the phone in my pocket and my wife had the remote door bell in hers, and we would sit there enjoying our coffee and cigarette, as neither of us ever smoked in the house.
Those were the precious times, along with all the humorous banter we had with our guests, most of whom came as guests and left as friends. So those are just some of the many thoughts that come to mind when I sit in my small sanctuary.
