Fremont

I wrote this back in 2005. I was having a rough time in a Silicon startup. Maybe I was close to burnout or a breakdown at that time; I know I was exhausted all the time.

Actually, I transcribed it in 2005, it was handwritten originally. This is chapter 4 of a book I started writing.

I miss writing. 

Fremont

The Saturn sat sulking in the back of the garage. Abandoned for a week, it seemed, no daily jaunt to the nucleus of the high-tech industry. Next to it, the Explorer ticked smugly as it cooled, the sweat of its labors dripping from the condenser of its air conditioner. It had done its work: two kids taken to school, a run to Starbucks, and then home again by way of the grocery store.

The 2 ½ car garage stood sentinel in front of the 2.5 bath, 3 beds, and large family room that made up part of the half-million dollar single-family home. The house quietly sucked electricity into its Tivo, its fridge, its air conditioner, and the PC. It breathed out a quiet hum of perfume-scented laundry air. It listened inattentively to the bumble bee hum of the gas-powered leaf blower at the end of the close. It sheltered Meredith from the heat of the day, a quiet seclusion for her work-from-home, self-sufficient self-employment. Her cell phone rang with the pomp of Elgar, her 10 am phone conference with Sally.

“So where’s Martin?” inquired Meredith’s marketing department.

“He’s gone to Austin for customer integration; they’re going live this month.” Sally had an implicit NDA as the friend of the wife, and so far had either rewarded the trust or not known what to do with the information she didn’t realize she had. “While the cat’s away…?” Sally was eager for a girls’ night out; they both deserved it, she reckoned. Silicon Valley widows, collecting the wages at the cost of losing their husbands to the incessant grind of the techno mills.

The evening was planned, and sitters secured. A girls' night of vino and karaoke.

Where my grandparents lived.

This was a couple of paragraphs I wrote just before attending my mums funeral. I know Cotesbach so well that I didn't need to be there to know what it looked like. I could almost feel the air and smell the area before I left Wales for this trip. I think I wrote this in preparation for the day, just so I could cope better.

He stood there by the village pump.  It was all so familiar, but it was all so different.  The quiet hamlet was still, as always; bypassed since before he first came here a child, and few additions since he were a wee young'un, when a row of semis were built along Main St. just beyond the small Norman church, opposite the rectory.

It’s not one of those perfect idyllic scenes, no duck pond, and no half timbered, thatched pub.  The “village” hall behind him was new enough that he remembered coming to visit his grandparents one summer to find half the green had been replaced by a building site, and by the time he visited for Christmas there was a low modern building surrounded by an awkward gappy hedge of young cypress trees.  Now the brick had thirty plus years of soot, and weathering to take the shine off it, and the building was obscured by tall luxuriant trees.

Though the playing field to the left of the hall had provided hours of fun, the adventures had been had on the right in his gran-dad's garden.  It had been a large plot of land with a pig sty, a glasshouse which in the summer had the bitter air of green tomatoes, and several sheds filled with rusting tools, smelling of dust, soil, paraffin, oil, mowers and rotovators.  In the orchard at the back of the quarter acre lot there had been a chicken run, where pullets and bantams strutted and clucked.  Fed on millet, mash and windfalls they paid with golden yolked eggs, and when the eggs came no more, nana would have them for the pot.  That land was off limits now.  Nana and grandad had a bungalow built there for their final years.  When their estate was settled the lot had been divided and sold.

By the pump was a modest semi.  That was where his mother had been born and raised.  That was the first place he’d spent the night away from home; where he’d learned to set and light a fire; where he’d woken, not to the sound of a dustcarts yawning hydraulics or city buses diesel purr, but to the soft baaing of sheep, and the lowing of cows.  This was the house where the food tasted smoky since grandad had always insisted that they use the range; anything cooked by gas tasted of, well gas of course.  Vegetables were boiled soft, potatoes softer and meat was thin and chewy.  Toast meant a tanned face as you sat on the hearthrug and held your bread inches above the late evening coals.  A tanned face, flushed with heat, but your feet cold from the draught as the fire pulled air into the house under the doors and through the gaps and cracks in the steel framed windows.

The last time he’d been in the village was a lifetime ago.  It had been a funeral.  Grandad outlived nana by a few years, they were buried up the street, alongside an uncle.  That was where he was going today, to say a final goodbye, this time to someone too young for such a parting, but someone who deserved the rest and peace.  His mother was coming home, to the place and people she loved.

Smiles

You know that feeling inside when you are pottering around some small town on a lazy afternoon.  The day is your day, and you are doing your thing; So you have this casual euphoria going on, the type that tends to a ease a casual smile onto your face, and make even the light drizzle conspire to add to the quaint beauty of the stone walls, and peeling paint on the window frames and iron railings.  So you understand this mood I’m talking of.  

You will also know that curiosity which will make you turn down that narrow alleyway, the one that slopes encouragingly towards the river, and you will know that sudden joy when the sun comes out to reveal a small walled garden. A red brick walled yard filled with terracotta pots pouring geraniums over the wall and floor, and the old butchers bicycle with its basket replete with goofy faced pansies or the rusty pram used as a planter full of snapdragons. Good, we are in the same place.  That smile on your face.  The one right then. That is the smile she always wears, and when I look at her face I feel like I too am stood there in that quiet alley, the walls ashine from the recent rain, and the plants green and fresh, their colours so alive.