On 25 June 2021 I posted:
I bought a vase.
I filled it with peonies from Mum’s garden.
The vase was made by a local potter, Tom Lochhead. Mum had known him, and he had inspired and encouraged Mum to start her own wee business making sculptures of domestic animals from clay. She owned a few of his pieces – a small jug and also a crocus bowl, both of which she has given to me in recent years when all Mum’s Christmas and birthday gifts have been things from the house that she was trying to get rid of.
Since buying that vase, nearly a year ago, a few other pieces have found their way into my possession… including the beautiful bowl above, and several other vases. No doubt in coming years, I will follow Mum’s lead and give them away to people as Christmas and birthday gifts. Meanwhile, I get such joy from picking a few sprigs in the garden and having a wee vase of flowers on my desk.
But, back to 25 June 2021… that afternoon I sent a message to a friend: I have switched off Mum’s Rayburn. .. I cried a wee bit but in a good way.
That Rayburn. It was the physical beating heart of our home, an extension of Mum’s love and warmth all my life. I learned to cook at the Rayburn. Our big ginger cat jumped onto the hot plate of the Rayburn when it was a kitten and PROING! immediately jumped up and off like a cartoon kitten when it realised it was HOT. Dad’s supper was always left ‘in the bottom oven’ back in the day when he was travelling back and forth from Edinburgh, and would always arrive some hours after we had eaten our supper. Meringues cooked like a dream in that slow bottom oven. You could make your own yoghurt overnight, using the gentle background warmth to keep the culture happy. I never really learned about timings when making a meal, as everything could be kept ‘on the side of the Rayburn’ to keep warm once it was ready. The oven in the Rayburn is most forgiving, making perfect roasts, warming stews and light cakes. Of course there was also that Christmas when we put the turkey in the Rayburn at breakfast time, only to notice at coffee time that the temperature had not come up. It had run out of oil, and would not be cooking our Christmas dinner that day.
In recent months, I had been reacquainting myself with the quirks of cooking with a Rayburn. It was a delight to take a slightly slower approach to making all our meals. Weekends were for batch cooking stews, casseroles and soups, sometimes a roast on Sundays. And through the week, the Rayburn would gladly reheat those batch-cooked meals from the freezer, so we could easily enjoy our main meal of the day at lunch time, and I could still get some paid work done.
It was impossible not to cloak the switching off of the Rayburn with meaning. But even without my default setting of overthinking and over-analysis of the situation, it was just heart-wrenchingly sad to lock the door of Mum’s house behind me, knowing that next time I opened that door all the warmth would have gone from her home.
At this point I think perhaps we knew that she might have left that home forever, although we were still fighting to find ways for her to come home when she was able.
(As an update to the last post, I did not get the job. It was handled incredibly badly and I regretted applying for it. It totally knocked my confidence for a while. However, the candidate who got the role is now a great colleague and I realise that however capable I was of doing that job, I know I did not have the headspace to persuade anyone else of that at the time. Since then I have thought a lot about work, and what I want out of it… and I have far better clarity now around how important (or not) my work is to me. It is no longer a key part of my identity, my social life does not revolve around it and it is not where I am inspired and learn and feel myself growing.. but I am lucky in that I am finding other ways to find that fulfilment. Work enables me to focus on what is important to me, and that feels very liberating.)
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If you want to catch up on how we got to this point, this series of posts starts here, with Taking Smock of the Situation.
Shewolfinthevalley 