A Sea-Fret

I drew the curtains this morning to find a sea fret hiding the Channel. The Green disappears into a misty distance with no sea on view.   I had a weekend of meetings and study and doing some witnessing letters and sofa-dozing in a haze of painkillers.  The Captain stewarded a swimming race and spent yesterday out in the field metal-detecting.  Oh and I am trying to find a gardener for one of the ladies we met on the doors.  She rings me and Jean every so often and says she is looking forward to seeing our little red car in her drive again.

I am re-reading the King biography of Janet Frame.  Ir would interest anyone who has read her wonderful autobiography.  The autobiography is in three parts and begins with "To the Is-Land".  It has made me want to quote Frame herself once again.  I put these quotes in a blog last year, but I do often think about them.

This is from the first part of the autobiography: "To the Is-Land":

"I remember a gray day when I stood by the gate and listened to the wind in the telegraph wires.  I had my first conscious feeling of an outside sadness, or it seemed to come from outside, from the sound of the wind moaning in the wires. I looked up and down the white dusty road and saw no-one. The wind was blowing from place to place past us, and I was there, in between, listening. I felt a burden of sadness and loneliness as if something had happened or begun and I knew about it.  I don't think I had yet thought of myself as a person looking out at the world; until then, I felt I was the world. In listening to the wind and its sad song, I knew I was listening to a sadness that had no relation to me, which belonged to the world."

The sadness that belongs to the world.  I often used to wonder about it.  Why?  What had happened?

Janet Frame actually goes on to answer the question she raises - but I don't know if she herself made the connection.  She is still very young, and is talking of visits to and from the uncles and the aunts. She says:

"The aunts were still there, still talking of Up Central and Middlemarch (Middlemarch, Lottie) and Inchclutha; and the uncles with their shy Frame look and the particular set of the lips that said, 'Everything should be perfect. Why isn't it?'"

Everything should be perfect. Why isn't it?  

Genesis answers that question and also assures us of the coming rescue, which is so close now.  That is what we, Jehovah's Witnesses, are trying and trying to tell you. So when you get a letter from us, as I hope you will, please read it carefully and think about it seriously.