A dizzy state of multiple dimension consciousness

Sheets, two under-sized, four sheets on the line, all white, half stolen from lost boxes, one like muslin, one linen, one is of a number of single soft almost woolly cotton with a diagonal grain originating from my grandmother Elizabeth’s “bottom drawer” 1929 [stuff that women collected for when they got married] On the other line, a crocheted bedspread also white with a few holes, that my grandmother Ruth had gotten a female acquaintance to make for her because she had admired the very much finer one that my mother had rescued from the burning of her Great Aunt’s effects and during my early life, it covered my parents’ bed. I was fascinated by the interconnecting web of strands of the finer version (now lost) and my age five exploration of it involved snipping through one of them with my mother’s nail scissors! Penetrating chastisement had come my way from my mother, who had no idea why I would ruin the thing, no understanding of how cutting one of the connections enabled me to feel the thickness and strength, the unravelling of fibres revealing something of how they had been interlocked and the sudden slackening of the patterned structure. I realised that in the “snipping” act, I had risked the peace of my own life and had tried to hide the scissors and cover the hole but soon she had caught me and I couldn’t tell her then, I believed her version that simply meant that I was wicked, I was deep in shame and forgot my own reasons and now I’m not going to bring it up because she will still be living in her definition of what happened and will trumpet the words “You were a Little Bugger!” and my explanation would be completely lost on her.

The following day finds me carrying the plastic washing basket across the road with the newly washed and dried bed-sheets and mattress cover, to the room – now guest room, with notions of Grandmother Ruth, who knew the cardinal importance of bedding in creating a professional room for paying guests. I have only surmised this because Gran told my child self, “I absolutely ALWAYS change the bedding between guests!”, I also remember her purchasing a roller iron specifically for bed-sheets, which was a thing like a huge electric heated mangle (there is something like it for finishing photographs) so the bed sheets went through and came out crisp and flat. There had been a discussion with my mother at the time, who was aghast at the thought of ironing bedding and must have missed the point of creating an assuring impression that the guest was about to enter sheets that had not been in contact with bodies of unknown others – since a very stiff washing procedure!
So I thought of my small Gran Ruth who spoke in an attempted gentrification of a cockney accent, as I tried to do a smart job of making the bed, though unlike when the actor came, I had not ironed the pillowcase and knew that Ruth’s job would have been harder, smarter, tighter and quicker than mine. However after laying her crocheted white bedspread (also washed) on top of the duvet, I decided to sew up the frayed parts where the crocheting had come undone or broken. I left and returned with white cotton, needle and scissors. I had realised that it would be possible to hone down upon the actual detail of the pattern and almost as quickly as an indiscriminate sewing up, I could reconstruct the pattern that had come undone! The three holes that I had at first noticed became about eight holes as I carefully traversed the surface. And yes, I was able to match up the pattern, which when finished and I looked at what it actually was, almost sent me into a dizzy state of multiple dimension consciousness because the tessellations consisted of four diamond shapes around a crossed intersection of horizontal and vertical lines, which ran the whole length of the plane of bedspread. In one way of looking, each four diamonds were wider than tall, but shifting to the next up by half a four cluster, the arrangement was four diamonds that were taller than wide! The shift was in a perceptual frame of reference and the only way to see a firm “reality” was to see the quilt as made up of squares (which is how it actually was constructed) and along the edge line internal to each of the four sides of the square, lay half a diamond!

Hedgerow

Standing in the beating heat of the hour between twelve and one, at the entrance to a dry woody cave – an archway of hawthorn, hazel and blackthorn – a hedgerow as long as my lifetime, indefinite before that, I waited listening and becoming the receiver of all it may offer. As I stepped onto the shaded compacted earth, I tuned my hearing to determine the components of what at first I had named “silence”, to find a subliminal humming chorus of thousands of hover flies, blue and green bottles and far away bumble bees merged from the surrounding acres of grasses. This ambient sound also contained a higher frequency – a soft multi-present swish, not that it could be water because the stream that runs here in an open ditch to my left, is dry. The soft hiss must be the faint breeze, in every bough, touching every leaf and grass stalk at once. The scale of the air movement is vast, only my own hearing level deceives – this quiet sound is as extensive as the roar and howl of a gale.

Speckled Wood butterflies dip and dance through this speckled wood, tiny flickering pictures of the light patterns on the leaf-scattered stones of the path.

Some hoverflies and the occasional bumble bee, zoom close in and out of my normal hearing range. Unlike the Harley Davidsons that pass my house restricted to the linear road, these beasts make their own pathways through the X, Y and Z dimensions in their own characteristic dances of optimal hunting and gathering manoeuvres.

Through both exits from the shady archway, to the heat of the open fields, tall white cow parsley punctuates the green of the bramble and blackthorn leaves and matching large white butterflies appear in rising tumbles together.

I exit west, my shadow appears as the sunlight heat penetrates my clothes and a wave of micro droplets exude across my face in an instant attempt to cool it – the living action of a body. My stray hairs and the grassy seed heads at my side are moved by the same breeze under the path of a large white butterfly. Sloe berries already full size, greenish matte blue, in direct sun, while the bramble fruit are still small, hard and green. Then the small warbling bird that intermittently, through the whole time I had been in the hedgerow, had made a sound like a resonant version of a tinkling brook on stones – a stand-in for the dried up stream, struck up again as if to remind me to mention him.