Ah well...

One of my late father's favourites.

I miss the very bones of him, you know.

When I was small, he held my hands and I danced on his toes to music from the ancient reel-to-reel tape recorder he played about with - I know I was a heavy lump and I must have weighed heavily upon his tootsies...

I remember dancing for him to "She wears red feathers and a hula-hula skirt" especially!

I think I had a Fifties' kind of upbringing in a northern coal-town, like my parents' had, although I was born early in the Sixties - Flower-power, and all that. The times of love and peace, man, passed me by until I was in my teen years and took to wearing an afghan coat and going about bare-foot in the streets!

Still, I have childhood memories which now seem golden to me. I'm not sure all of the memories were golden, perhaps it's just in sepia and faded polaroid I remember them...

Dad's ashes have sat for just over a year in a corner of my living room, occasionally accusing me - They are double-sheathed, encased in a bronzed urn and then in the rather distinguished royal purple bag they came in with golden threaded handles. He died four, nearly five years ago.

They sit there in silence, in transition, awaiting transportation to a beach of sacred and long-holy spirit some few miles from my home where I will cast them to the earth and the north winds...

It's a beautiful place that attracts crowds of tourists most of the year.

We holidayed on the quasi-island a couple of times, and Dad insisted we scatter my Mother's ashes here almost fifteen years ago.

And that we did... It was a beautiful ceremony, I know.

And I'm sorry I haven't managed it yet!

I mean the task of scattering yours...

Forgive me, Dad. I know you do. I know you know how much I loved you.

I know you know.

How much I love you still.

I miss your unconditional love of me. Your full acceptance of me. Your love for me.

I hope you know, Dad,

...How much your grandson, my son Grizz, reminds me of you.

Each and every day. He has our fingers, particularly the bent middle finger on one hand that we all share.

He is as careful with money as you were.

He has your height, your grace, your wit and humour, and he is still his own soul. I think he has your nose too!

And I know that you would love him. Just as you always did. Perhaps more.

I want to make your ashes rain from the heavens like stars as you did for your beloved Joanie, my Mam.

Tonight, I can see you shaking your head, and smiling at my fecklessness, noting my loss of you in my life.

I know you will understand why I haven't been able to do this thing, not just yet.

I know you, above all, understand me.

You loved your Daddy's Girl...

And I know I will always be this, as I write these words and my well of tears rains down tonight.

For no-one else (perhaps apart from Grizz) has ever meant quite as much to me in this life, before or since I lost your dear soul.

I will love you always... I hope you know.

Here lies one whose name was writ in water...

Our memories are fleeting things, are they not?

I find myself dredging up older memories, wallowing in them like one possessed;

Losing, like melted butter slipping between my clumsy fingers, those that might only have happened in, say, the last five years...

Ageing is like that. It's all uphill from here!

So, I promised to give you the summary of the brief time spent recently in my dad's home, sorting the wheat from the chaff, locating some treasures as it turned out, and learning to give up others for good...

I sat on the abandoned bed, now bereft of any covers, and settled down to sift through yet one more mystery box.

Stretching my body to reach it, secreted as it was under a very heavy box, I found a large clear plastic bag, bright white envelopes franked 'Aden', bearing the image of the Queen in her Coronation Year, and addressed in a small rounded hand to my mother, Joan Crawford, at her parents' home in a seaside village, not forty miles from where I live today.

Their love letters.

Letters which made their appearances over the years, in the house we lived in from when I was born, which was filled with mass-market eastern treasures they brought back with them from overseas. There were black painted tables and jewellery boxes, fragile shelves separated with spindles of glass, all decorated with scenes of blue mountain and silvery lake, tinged with the red light of the sun.

...I remember the letters, hidden away from prying eyes and from me, towards the deep bottom of a white wicker blanket chest, an ottoman... Letters held together with white ribbon, hugger-mugger with their Wedding Day favours and baby pink cards that celebrated their Little Girl's Birth -- Me.

The cards always appeared mysterious to me. Exotic. Private. Romantic.

Reminiscent of that other era. A time of shared films and Eldorado ices at the Wallaw Cinema, sometimes for both the first and the second sitting...

A hand outstretched in seaside photos, my mother, lovely with her dark hair and brows, when I only ever knew her as a Platinum, and then naturally silver Blonde. Red lips sketched in black and white, pale capri pants and a white seersucker blouse. Her Grace Kelly headscarf pinned firmly in place. She's asking my father to give her his hand so she can climb up from the sandy beach. He's standing above her on the prom, laughing, one hand outstretched to tempt her, with the other he's taking the photograph, teasing her playfully. He remained playful to the end of his days.

Beautiful.

And now I have their memories and their voices, and I'm going to keep them safe and sound too... I might not read them. I don't think I was supposed to, do you?

Perhaps I shall find a fine cedar-lined box to hold them tight, scented with love and filled with the gratitude I have for my reclaimed memories of the love that they shared...

A time when they were separated by thousands of miles of air, redolent of warm spices, and parted by the wild wide ocean, his socks full of desert sands, her heart full of excitement and love...

Once more I have found a little space where some part of peace has been returned to me.

For a while...