Island Time

   Scenes from the Morning Walk

I am unable to relax into island time, perhaps the thing I seek most in coming here again. I feel the weight of the month slipping away from the outset, like childhood slipping through your fingers, unstoppable.
    I try to race it by rising early and wasting not a second- up before anyone I plant my towel on a chair and set off down the beach for a leisurely stroll and then back to sit in quiet solitude for a few hours before the children wake. The heat of the day hits and I dare not retreat inside for fear of losing some precious seconds. By the end I am exhausted from fighting time too diligently.
    The next day I decide to sleep in and start the day slowly and leisurely which fits in with Lulu being sick and needing a gentle day. The day vanishes and I wonder where to. At 4.30, the sun is low and I manage a redeeming hour in the pool which brings the day alive again.
    Island time, or as Jay says “What time is it? It’s who cares time,” alludes me this time with the children here. Island time for me is in the early waking hours, as at home, when I am my own island, isolated from the children’s sleeping bodies and the demands of yet another day. In solitude an island, until the tide goes out  and the children awake and can walk across to me. Then who cares time vanishes into layers of sunblocking, meals, clothes and just entertaining and organising them.
    But this to will vanish, and unlike the tides it will not return. Once they have moved on they will never return to childhood, only visit from the distance of their independence.
    If I could pause the morning hour would I? Somedays I would but more vehemently I’d like to pause their childhood, divide it up and scatter it through out my life. Perhaps today I would visit again those precious newborn months, and then maybe put it on hold and have the afternoon off from motherhood. If that life were not so linear, linear and cyclic at the same time. All there is is to be in it at any given point, tarring not forward nor back. Even the tides that come and go daily transform over the years, sculpting our landscape as our days sculpt our lives.