vestiges of memory...

I grew up in the Fens, although you wouldn't really have known it was fenny. Yes, there were the long drains and dykes but fenland and marshes are now rare little pockets hidden and small. All has been drained but alongside rivers and drains sometimes along the flood plains are the reeds and sedges of the marshland, here and there a boggy fen now mainly tucked away within a woodland often within a 'nature reserve' marked, separate and 'other'

But I am from this place, it holds the bones of my ancestors, I am indigenous and within my ontological self I hold a few brief, barely tangible, hard to hold memories....

always always without thinking why whenever i think of a house i would like to own I always imagine one running alongside a stream or drain or gote or dyke, one with a little bridge to enable egress to shelter and safety. This to me since childhood began has seemed the natural way of a home, the right way to live. There are many of these homes still; linear stretches of street or drove... I have lived in a terrace once in the far distant westlands of Cornwall. A new build a little eco-terrace with a man-made brook in front of the houses and a grate to walk over to reach home. It seemed exactly the right thing to have! Perhaps my fen memory led me to that little space and although I wasn't to live in it for long i loved that little shelter and felt safe and secure behind my mote

i have devised a plan too... for my end of life when i am still a little able... a plan of kayaking west.... heading out in my own little boat when all my power has almost dwindled... perhaps this too is a vestige of fen memory that I carry on some gene whim, an idea that is far from original but echoes the boatman of old... carrying away across the waters... and I unthinking plan such an end as it seems fitting and apt...

we carry our past with us on our journeys forward