It was a lunar eclipse and a blood moon and the weekend delivered. Margaret’s daughter’s 30th; Jacobi and Blake swept in from Holland and Stoke, we coalesced at the farm on Thursday night and set off on Friday morning. A long drive, it always feels like that as we queued past Stone Henge, masses of tourists and a 1960’s citröen that recalled journeys with my mother. Longleat signalled only another hour and finally, itchy feet and aching bones we rolled into Bruton. Tinnitus and Andy’s need for silence arranged me At The Chapel and J&B with him. He’s a good step dad. He steps up. We delivered J&B to car parking attendance with Issy and I got stuck in to last minute arrangements for a weekend party that spanned generations.
Yeehaw it was a cowboy hoe down, the house filled with hats and boots and beautiful yoot, old friends and the children of absent friends who I hadn’t seen since they were small. We laughed and danced and ate a Mexican feast and Teds turned up to hold a burlesque drag queen quiz which had Blake up on stage as Bad Mom in silver foil hair net, black bin liner pregnant belly and huge white bin liner tits, lip sinking rouged pout to Man, I feel Like A Woman along with Margaret and Lumai and a whole host of others. Oh how we laughed.
The next day was the blood moon and The Johnsons who whipped up a storm and had us line dancing. Sun beat down on our beats, we all had the feeling it was the last heat of the summer. As the party emptied in the late afternoon, Margaret and I played backgammon on the grass as her grandson waddled about happily free and naked throwing the dice for us. We’d noticed a wind had got up. It kept whipping the tablecloth over the jugs of water. But none of us noticed the back door wasn’t wedged open. It hadn’t crossed our minds as he baby podged towards it, little fingers reaching for the frame. A soft hand, a look over his shoulder, a door, a sudden, spilt second wind whip slam, and the party, so full of love and heightened wild came to a spilt end. This is not the place for details and forty eight hours later, he’s fine and so are his parents and so is Margaret and the whole wider family, but it involved blood and screams and A&E and an awful lot of panic. It was a shocker. It was a blood moon. It was a lunar eclipse.
We cleaned and packed and put away, washed up and emptied and undid and cooked so that when they came home to the heaven’s opening in almighty storm, their home was warm and cosy and they could be fed and recount the events and laugh and cry at the circular motion of such a weekend that took them back and forward through time. For the little guy now sporting a boxing glove of a bandage, it will be a story he learns, Tell it again, mummy and his lovers will point at his scar and say, What happened?
In amongst it all I found time to splash in the quarry with Bun, an early morning, I guess it was Saturday, when we met amongst divers heavy with tanks, and free divers, light with lack of oxygen, and civilised swam, a gentle breaststroke around the buoys in the early morning light.
It’s been a weekend.
Eleanor
