Buckling down

Or as my son’s game seems to call it ‘digging in’.

My grandad died a couple of days ago. Such a bald statement to convey every state of grief, guilt, pain, and worry I have, but its all I have to explain it.

Yesterday, we went for a walk – and I was thinking about everything my grandad taught me – he used to grow vegetables and flowers in his garden, and I have many fragmented, flash memories of those beautiful mornings and afternoons, when I was fairly young, running around his garden. Of course, my memories seem to also include fairies at the bottom of his garden, but mom said he used to hide cut-out flower fairies along his fence when I was very small, so that makes sense. Seemingly, he also gave me other things – or at least, he and gran did. Gran died just over 20 years ago, and since the, grandad has been kinda…lost. I understood why, even at 9 and 10, but there was very little I could do. As I grew older, he seemed to pull away – whether I reminded him, a bit of gran, or because we all grew a bit distant when I hit my teens, I’ll never know, but by the time I started a family of my own, I wasn’t seeing him much. And I feel sad about that. Its funny – we never think they’ll leave us, that we’ll have ‘tomorrow’ to fix it all – to say all of the things we want to say. Tomorrow is an excuse. It might sound harsh, but I always said ‘I’ll call tomorrow’ and never do. I always say ‘I’ll write tomorrow’ and get through my Uni work, and then go and goof off. I always say ‘It can wait’. Friday night made me realise that some things just can’t wait.

Yesterday, I was fairly subdued. My partner has never met my grandad – and now, I realize, he never will – so we went for a walk, and on our way back, on my door step, I found a spouting conker. I know it wasn’t there when we left, and we have a walled garden, so goodness knows how it got there.

Now, though I have a conker tree in my front yard called Bill. After my grandad. For the happy memories.

I stopped writing though, for anything other than university, about six weeks ago, and today, I’m going to try buckling down. I’m not sure whether I ‘believe’ in writers block, personally (though, yes, I believe others can ‘have’ it) but I know something is stopping some of my writing. I’m going to try to bulldoze it first before anything else. I’m hoping, like the tree I planted for my grandad, I can make something of my life, and honour him, and the rest of my family for all of the things they invested in me.