an open field

drawing 18” by 16”, felt tip pen on coloured paper by Ffion, age 4 There is a red house with orange windows and a pink door. There is a black cat whose feet have slipped off the bottom of the page. There is a tree sprouting flowers, petals pushing against the paper’s edge, a lavender sky with a sun and a crescent moon. And floating above the roof of the house, two stick people, holding hands, unwilling to come down to earth and decide whether the sun is about to set, or if the moon will make way for dawn, or whether the cat is trying to escape or climb into the picture and run towards a door that could be closed, or might be on the point of opening. all the times I have been wrong fresh paint from forgiving the rain (Snapshot Press 2012)

1 & 2 Cae Cottages in 2014 From 'Three Houses' wiping the dust off my grandmother's clock another year Memory paints my grandparents like the characters in a Dutch interior: Granny in the doorway between the porch and dark scullery, D’cu sitting in a low chair by the fire where two brass horses rear on blocks of polished oak. I enter silently, from daylight on the unpaved lane, stepping down over the stone hearth into the shadows, as if even the slightest noise could tear the membrane that divides remembering from not remembering.  I am sure I stayed here once although my mother cannot be sure. But I know the two connected bedrooms in the eaves, the cool lino beneath my bare feet, lying in an iron bed with my sister watching the squeeze of sunlight and dust around the edges of the pulled curtains.  The garden is a field with long grass and trees and an outside privy where, a young woman with auburn hair tells her two wide-eyed daughters, I was once ch...

A residential weekend at the beautiful Ty Newydd on the Llyn Peninsula in North Wales. 9th to 11th of May 2014 More details here. and now, with May, after the south side blossoms come those on the north Nigel Jenkins (1949 - 2014)