domingo, 4 de outubro de 2009

Life delayed / Life goes on

A week spent in the north of Portugal, on my mother’s vineyard. Having gone with so many plans and ambitions, much time was wasted, distracted by impossible fantasies, and lost moments of staring into space.

One of my many cousins picked me up from the airport in Oporto and we drove to the depths of beauty and seeming nowhereness that is the Douro Valley. He’s a strapping young (gentle)man of 25, and off to do a PhD in biochemistry in the Netherlands, where his younger brother is also embarking on an exciting career as a dancer.

My 88-year-old bedridden grandmother commanded her usual authority from her abode, while we strained to make her comfortable and maintain an acceptable level of dignity, sitting her up, taking her her meals, remembering to give her her medicine. I was stoical about it, but also disturbed by the perceived constant presence of death, and the anxiety brought about by the feeling of life trickling away, and life without an apparent purpose. Back in London, in a whole other environment, I wondered if I was proud of what I had done, and concluded that no, it just had to be gotten on with.

One of my plans had been to re-do some of the walks that Michelle and I had mapped last year. But I only got around to doing one walk, down to the river from my grandmother’s farm, and up again, including part of the path that my mother used to cover daily when, as a child, she used to go to school nearby.