Staying at Furnace Farm

I am sure I have blogged this wonderful poem before, and said this before, but it gets truer and truer.  My sisters came down for the week - and there we were, three elderly ladies - well, they are not quite as elderly as me, but we are all retirement age.  Not that we are all retired - but we are that age.  Yet, only yesterday...

As in the poem, the young girl, Time, runs faster and faster.


Staying at Furnace Farm 
by Alison Brackenbury

All houses have noises. In Maggie's old house
I hear a rush. It is taps, I think, water.
Unsteady with dreams , I go to the window.
No rain beats the curtains. The night is half over.

I have heard time.
She ran down the stairs
like a girl to her lover.


I can remember many years ago, as I was heading towards 40 years old, and was wondering about it all - what it all meant - why?, all those whys - and thinking how short our lives are - and wondering if these few years are all the time we will ever have to spend with those we love.

Then two Jehovah's Witnesses called at my door and showed me what the Bible on my shelf had been telling me all along.

No wonder we feel the rush of time.  Our first parents were made to live forever.  And yet our lives now are here and gone in what seems like a few minutes.  barely the flight of the sparrow.   But our Creator, Jehovah, is holding out his arms to every one of us offering us back what our first parents so tragically threw away.

Please listen to his witnesses when we call.

Anyway, we - us elderly sisters - had a very nice week together. We had a day out in Chi - at the Pallant Gallery on Tuesday, (half price for pensioners), and lunch at an Italian Restaurant - excellent pizza sizzling with fresh herbs.   We had dinner at the Arun View on Wednesday.  And on Friday we met up with the long lost Elizabeth for a coffee morning, at the Pier Road Coffee and Art Cafe (much recommended), and I bought some pressies for the littlest granddaughters - the older ones and the grandson get the usual envelope with money.

And on Saturday morning we shopped, and did some shopping for a young friend who is not well, and got ourselves into a such a muddle we nearly bought the Supermarket to a standstill...

We got a lot of writing done during the week - and my book is finally finished!  Shakespeare wrote his whole oeuvre quicker.  (And better, I hardly need to add.)

The question now is, will my young publisher publish it?  The news will appear in my blog, if the Coronavirus spares me. It is about the two houses of my childhood and has my parents in it, in (very affectionate) caricature. I have borrowed the plot of Rebecca, second wife wondering about mysterious death of first wife, but it goes off in a different direction. And I hope it will be both scary and funny - and above all, readable.