So Gaze development didn’t happen and it knocked me off my writing perch for awhile. Being in the vulnerable age bracket, being the executive producer for a young theatre makers’ company Performance Collective Stranraer, having close family undergoing chemotherapy has been all I can process, and gardening. Our garden has never looked better. In the third week of our voluntary isolation and the first official lockdown week in rural Scotland I found nine seville oranges glued to the base of my chest freezer…..
April 2020
I am making orange marmalade.
Whole fruits boil in water, melt the ice of courage, crystallise memories in dissolving sugar.
Cut. Shred. Stir.
Split oranges into wedges, flick out pips at the point of a knife. Our mouths are swarthy with un-kept promises,
squeezing the juiciness out.
Add. Dissolve. Boil.
Who’d have thought it would be like this, gentler than expected?
By my backdoor a jackdaw hunches, flotsam the wind blew in, dropped onto a chilled plate.
At the perimeter the old fox slides his teeth into a grin.
Roil. Pour. Set.
Google calendar pings phantom meetings into sterilised jars. The sky is a cerulean blue devotion, bluer than a saver screen.
Carolyn A Yates 