I have a lot to be grateful for. Here is a list
1. Dogs; incredibly beautiful, friendly loving. Gilty, in particular, must have been the work of a superior spiritual being.
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| Syrup and Gilty Posing Obligingly on the Well, Outside the Kitchen Window
Gilty is the whitish one, although they are both permanently dirty from rolling around in the mud, chasing mice and getting wet. He is a fine lesson to human kind. Forgiving, loving, persistent, sensitive, funny and unpredictable.
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2. A beautiful house. I'm afraid I don't really have any new or exciting pictures of the house. But it's becoming a cosy, warm refuge from the outside. The garden is really the last big job left. I am flexing my muscles.
3. Some nice friends and a beautiful environment
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| The Traditional Boxing Day Walk up to the Top of the Mountain |
If you translate from the Spanish it's "mountain". But it's not really. Still, the views are spectacular.
4. A language that provides me with sustenance.
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| The Flag is Pretty Too |
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| Hoodies don't exist Here |
5. The most fabulous son that any father could wish for.
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| The Light |
6. Health. Good health is one of those things that everybody takes for granted until you find yourself on the slab. So after the scare we had with Jacky soon after he was born, what more can one ask for?
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| A Serious Business this Swinging |
Since I believe all lists should contain ten things, I am going to complete this one.
7. Fabulous food.
8. Good Company
9. Books
10. Poems
Today's which is especially fabulously wonderful. And I don't normally like poems that don't rhyme although that sounds totally crass.
Good-Bye For A Long Time
A furnished room beyond the stinging of
The sea, reached by a gravel road in which
Puddles of rain stare up with clouded eyes:
The photographs of other lives than ours ;
The scattered evidence of your so brief
Possession, daffodils fading in a vase.
Our kisses here as they have always been,
Half sensual, half sacred, bringing like
A scent our years together, crowds of ghosts.
And then among the thousand thoughts of parting
The kisses grow perfunctory; the years
Are waved away by your retreating arm.
And now I am alone. I am once more
The far-off boy without a memory,
Wandering with an empty deadened self.
Suddenly under my feet there is the small
Body of a bird, startling against the gravel.
I see its tight shut eye, a trace of moisture.
And ruffling its gentle breast the wind, its beak
Sharpened by death: and I am yours again,
Hurt beyond hurting, never to forget.
