Wuthering Sunday

It's become a standing joke in the Moller family that just about all my Mothering Sundays - since becoming a mother - have been blighted in one way or another. The worst of them, of course, was when my beloved mother-in-law Mollie died before dawn broke on my second crack at the whip. 2017 was supposed to be the first perfect one - until a virus knocked out the smallest of us, so we had to cancel our plans to see my own mother. Undaunted, she's invited a bunch of folk over to hers for dinner - and we're squinting at the final episode of Gilmore Girls through the sunshine. (Coffee and doughnuts on the side, of course.)

I wrote this on Mother's Day in 2014, and took this picture of our trip to the beach. The photo paints a better picture than the film, which shows much more typical Dunbar weather. The star of March's film is my washing, appropriate for today, since motherhood means doing 50 billion loads a week.  You can see why I never have to iron my sheets. Not that I really would iron them, but I'd feel bad looking at how wrinkled they were, if their every crease weren't blasted out of them by our North Sea wind.

Most of us have mothered or been mothered in some way at some point in our lives, and so in that spirit, I wish you well today, and hope the sun is shining on you as brightly as it is on us. Even if we have had to close the curtains to see the telly better.

Wuthering Sunday

Halfway through the 40 days

This one, I'm told, is meant for me

A pause in the usual round, perhaps

A posy tied tight with his green love

Friends' pictures paint a different day

Posted quickly, flushed with pleasure

Sunlit blooms flank wine in flutes

As manly hands grip the wheel for once

Lunches out, or tea for two

Handmade cards, crepe roses drooping

They all squeeze together to say

This day is for her; just this, but hers

My day starts with the thump of a head

Regretting too-long birthday cheer

And my stomach shakes a violent no

To his offer to break my fast in bed

Emerging from our blanket, warm,

We set out with the beach in mind

But fog obscures this day of sun

And the sea says north with every roll

The sky heaves blind into the waves

Which take their hue from his father's face

Still to emerge from a softer bed

A line to say he should not yet

And here against the dragging grey

Burns a small yellow candle, straight and true

Hopping from rock to pool to sand

Then lighting our way home again

I put match to paper, then to wood

And we retreat behind the fringes

To eat and watch some hundred dogs

A first for those wide eyes, not mine

It fizzles out in bangs and shouts

This day of mine, just for me

My hands lift up the smoothing iron

As the light of my life is doused, for now.