My Dad is presently in hospital north of here, and his flat is all of 50 yards from the house where I grew up! Going there has meant travelling a lot of old roads familiar from childhood - everything looks so much smaller now, and of course some things are gone or irrevocably changed. Don't get me wrong, about the only thing I liked seeing again in this run down beach resort was the sea - watching the tide again caught me unexpectedly and powerfully in a place I didn't know I'd missed. This page is the result ....
I began with a water spattered Distress Ink page which made me think of a big sky, and bordered it with strips from my home-made collage sheet (made from patterns cut out of a house magazine for those who missed it). There was much about the town that was, as ever, a little bit lurid and gaudy, and these bright colours caught something of that. Most of my pages begin with a word or short sentence, and that's what happened here.
And then my nostalgic mood deepened into other regrets ... that in 36 years of marriage we have spent only the first four by ourselves, and have had a parent living with us since before our girls began to leave home. I feel guilty about it, but we do find ourselves longing for a time when it will be just the two of us ... and a lot quieter than it is at present. Maybe you have to acknowledge such feelings now and again, before you can tuck them away again and get on with dealing with reality?
So it turned out to be all about space and light, both physically as well as with and for our souls. Strange isn't it, how this deep longing welled up in me and found expression here? That's one reason why I love art journalling so much - its often a healing process of working through things, and sometimes, as here, you sit down to do one kind of page and end up with something quite different which needed to be looked at and acknowledged.And right now, yet another parent needs my time and (limited) energy, so it all has to go back in the box, though maybe, just maybe, there's a little less of it than there was to cram back in .... and one day, soon, we're going to take off for the coast and find something there for a few hours that I now know I need.
