Some fifty plus years ago, when I was a little girl, my mother made my brother a butterfly net out of a bamboo garden cane, a hoop of wire and an old net curtain. I don’t know how often he used it, but I suspect it wasn’t that often.
Whether he tired of it in the first few weeks, or whether it was when it came out of the shed on the second summer and he was off on his bike in the park with his mates, somehow, I managed to inherit it.
Continue reading “small blues”
I wrote yesterday in “monsters and fairies” about stories that parents tell to their children about events that happen in the children’s lives before they are really old enough to form personal memories. Those stories can take on a life of their own and become formative parts of the child’s story.
There are other personal stories that parents tell their children, of course, including ones they recall about their own childhoods. And then there’s a step further back along the chain to the stories that our parents were told about their early childhoods by their own parents.
Continue reading “fill in the details”
There are stories that parents tell their impressionable children that remain with them for their whole lives. I’m not sure why I’m feeling nostalgic, but I’ve been remembering two such stories, one from my mother and one from my father.
Both are set in the dim and distant past, when we lived in Scotland.
Continue reading “monsters & fairies”
I’ve never really celebrated Father’s Day. I don’t think anyone did when I was a small child and then, when it became more well-known in the UK, it was considered an American import and looked down on by my parents’ generation. Now, though, it’s almost impossible to ignore. Even when email newsletters offer the chance to opt out of Father’s Day updates, it seeps through on social media, in the news, and in shelves stacked with bottles at the supermarket.
Continue reading “father’s day gift”
Yesterday, for reasons that I won’t go into here, I was thinking about things I am grateful for. It turns out I am grateful for many many things. Including the fact that I have a tendency towards optimism and gratitude.
Indeed, there are so many things I should give thanks for that it’s hard to know where to begin. So I decided that I’d skim through the colours of the rainbow and see what were the first things that came to mind.
Continue reading “gratitude rainbow”
don't confuse the narrator 