writing our way whole: 53 at home eastering

It is Full Moon tonight, Easter Saturday.

I am reminded that in the various systems and formulae that have determined the position of Easter – in the Christian Church’s calendars – the Full Moon features big.

This Easter season has caught me napping, perhaps like the Hare that features in a recent writingpresence poem – embedded in a post of which I am very fond. (It received a compliment from somebody very special to me, who responded: “It’s really good. I read it to the very end”.)

Yes, this week before Easter – Holy Week – caught me napping, curling up in bed during daytime this week. Processing (through sobbing) some grief at suppressed family conflict that has been hounding me for over half my life.

Yet on other days I have been out and about in the landscapes and village communities that sustain me up here in Sutherland, interacting with warm and welcoming neighbours and friends. Some have been locals for generations, and some are more recently arrived than I.

And (along with you readers) we are all, in a sense, locals… locals to our global village … locals to this vulnerable but strong Earth, which is mother to each of us.

Including my online friends all over the world. Including some in New Zealand (where my maternal grandmother, Nanna Beattie, emigrated in her 80s to be close to her two sons and their families).

And some ( like the Guest Poet featured below) in Canada, where before my birth my paternal grandmother Nanna Fanny died.

A few years before her death, she’d emigrated to join my Aunty Enid. Enid had married her Canadian sweetheart Horace Servis who had come to Europe to serve in WW2.

I met both Horace and Enid when they came to stay with us on their last visit to Europe in the 1960s, and I corresponded with Enid until her death in the 1990s, a few years after my dad Eric, her only and older brother, died.) I miss her cheerful nature, and still have her Christmas Nativity scene, which she sent to us when my son when was tiny, and a brooch that she entrusted to me – belonging to my great-grandmother – for my wedding.

There is a lot of dying in this essay – perhaps appropriate for me to be writing this on Easter Saturday, in the Easter story the “in between” day, maybe the day when so much work was done between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, however you understand those terms.

Especially since just a few days ago I received a massive delivery of boxes of personal effects from my previous family home, including the genealogy papers that my dad had so painstakingly compiled from his research – without Internet in those days – and that I (as his last daughter of four) had agreed to care for after his death.

Well, only a few months ago I arranged with my younger nephew – himself researching his ancestry these days, and keen to pass that on to his two small and delightful children – that he would take from me the burden of being Keeper of the Labrum Family Tree. (Labrum, his mother’s maiden name, is my birth name before I married a McVittie, and since my separation has crept back in as an informal “middle name”.)

In fact my nephew said he would be honoured to take on the task – partly continued by me using what patchy skills I have in these matters – of organising and continuing his grandfather’s work and disseminating an electronic copy throughout his generation of cousins, of whom my son is the youngest.

Thank you my friend! What a weight off my mind, once I have had one last handling of the paper copies, one last wander through the albums of black and white photos … including those of my two Nannas, one of whom I knew and loved, and one who never knew me in her lifetime, but whom I am getting to know.

For further seasonal activities you may like to explore these writingpresence.com posts from previous Aprils.

(Remember that they were written at different stages of the Pandemic and under different prevailing global conditions. They haven’t been re-edited since then, as the team players at writingpresence have been busy writing poetry and essays elsewhere.)

And below them is the Guest Poem ‘Easter Weekend’ from Murray Robertson in Canada. So be sure to read on to the end.

writing our way whole: 5 at home breathing

writing our way whole: 6 at home with name calling

writing our way whole: 42 at home celebrating

poem: Full Beltane

Guest poem from Canada

from my friend Murray Robertson whose wordpress presence is at https://mrobertsonphotosandpoems.wordpress.com/author/murrayrobertsonphotography/

Easter Weekend

wandering on a lawn
we see new growth
      this time of year

a good morning wish
   (for you)

      today looks promising
(not at all threatening)

that's how it looks
      from here


i remember when you
      were a small boy

and now you have
      a small boy 
   of your own

      who reminds me
   of the boy you were 
not very many years ago


easter is a spring thing
      a time to celebrate

new green (fresh growth)
   and a kind of renewal

      is it another metaphor


there are so many of them


This poem © Murray Robertson 2022

murray robertson | April 16, 2022 at 2:56 pm | Categories: Uncategorized |