Under the sky

On my need to wander

Let’s start with roses: the wild sprawling kind, spilling yellow petals all over the pavement. Let’s start with the ripe, wet-looking furl of new leaves on the beech hedge, its feet thick with litter, and the fluffy round globes of dandelions going to seed and growing tall and wiry around the front doors and the old gates. Bright sparrows on the telephone wires. Rare blue sky. These are the things I saw today when in a burst of something like rage and something like seized joy, I turned the key on my mobility scooter and trundled slowly around a turn of the terraces.

Some things happen so gradually that you don’t realise how far you’ve slipped. It struck me the other day: I have stopped wandering. 

It was writing that brought the clarity, as it always does. I have been working on the edits for my new book in which the places of my neighbourhood are allowed to shine in all their scruffy, beautiful glory — the decayed urban streets and backways which I am so fond of and find so much goodness in. I noticed that all my recent recollections came from odd times when my partner has been home from Denmark and pushed me around in my chair. I have stopped wandering on my own.

I’m trying not to blame myself. The cold season has been long, grey and wet and by the time I’ve got myself bundled up, I’ve often been too exhausted to get myself onto the scooter and bump my way around in the chill. Even before that, it was getting harder and harder. I have been trying to prioritise work each day in order to try and hold life together and with such a small energy budget, have to sacrifice most of everything else. The mobility scooter doesn’t meet my needs well either. It makes my legs burn and cramp. I struggle to see clearly and as I move, I’m met with a shifting, pulsing wall of vertigo and light sensitivity. I wear out quickly with the bumps and the jolts and the trying-to-find-a-drop-kerb. There often comes a forceful wave of loneliness outside, too. I am different out there. I look different. I feel different. It isn’t easy, I know that.

Still, two more things are true: I am not afraid of pain and I must wander. By not prioritising the slow bimblings after which this blog is named, I can feel myself like a plant in too small a pot in too dark a room. Wandering is who I am.

My reclamation this morning didn’t last long – I hadn’t charged the scooter battery and the lights soon blinked alarmingly – but it was enough to remind me: I need this.

Out there, I can see the signs and symbols that are so important to me. The first thing I saw was that pavement covered in petal hearts like a blessing — I had forgotten how quickly loneliness is eased when you are surrounded by a world eager to speak to you and tell you its secrets, all the time. Out there, I get to see the details of things — the brown of the old ivy at the playground that has been cut from the ground but still clings on, the splay of wildflowers and weeds everywhere that I still don’t know all the names of, the way the high-vis-jacketed men push mowers up and down the municipal verges, their faces blank and thick with thought. I have work to do out there. It may not need me, I’m under no real illusion there, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a place for me. 

I don’t know what the answer is. A better scooter? An electric wheelchair? Just to bloody well hurry up and magically get better at last? I don’t know. I don’t know, but it has flung all else into context. I’m not sure what real use my writing is, my career is even, if I’m not touching gentle fingers to the roses or watching my shadow shift across the brick walls, if I’m not reading and listening to everything, everything all around me.

I’m just going to have to figure it out, all over again, aren’t I? I always have before, how to live and live, despite, whatever. I won’t stop now.

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