Sharing wisdom from my body as it heals. Words transmuted from physical pain. When we heal ourselves and our bodies, we heal the world around us. Regenerating the world around us starts from within.
Sat on the car, in my favourite sliders, all mucky after the long summer. My beloved sandy sliders, all scuffed with fun. Sat on the car in my loose stripey tshirt. With the crew, the gang, the mischief. My cousins. All outside nonna’s house, at dusk whilst the adults bantered away inside. The smell of dusk, of the crumbing chalky walls, the cracked slabs. Who’s car was it? Who knows? Who cared. We did want we want, truly wild, in the Wild West as my Dad used to call it. Uncivilised, not like my English orderly friends.
Waiting for Nonna’s loud screech, to tell us we’d done something wrong, but in a way that we loved and tempted her for. The chaos we used to bring to her every summer, the 4 of us. If it wasn’t sharpening sticks to try and catch some birds with a bow and arrow, or dropping stones on the car below. I remember clearly the time the car stopped and looked up at the balcony, and we all ran as fast we could to hide in the wardrobe before hearing the ding dong of the doorbell. Oh shit, we really did it this time. The 4 musketeers. In our sandy sliders. Nonna covered us of course, she said she didn’t know where we had gone. What a legend. Until he left and then we all cried like babies. Oops we went too far.
The 4 musketeers continued on our quest of wildness. A few years later in big boys cars, ready to go dancing like the queens that we were. Until we got back at 6am, all of the adults waiting for us sat in a row. Oops we did it again.
The kitchen was always wide open, full of people, full of life, full of conversations, arguments, banter, everything that life had to offer was in that kitchen. The kitchen was our refuge when we needed a pause. A moment to reconnect, to be soothed, to be told off and banished again to the wild outside.
To football from basketball, the amount of times we kicked the ball through the metal fence and had to chase it down the hill.
(June 2022)