Florence Hooton (the author's maternal grandmother), 1912-1988.
Homing
In the summerhouse, in the orchard,
dried flies and badminton racquets,
slackening. Soft fumes of sun-warmed
creosote and mildewed cushions. Laps
spanned by your sewing box. You
stitched. Pins in lips. I sorted: thimbles,
pinked ribbon, buttons, sequins. Each in
their correct compartment. Our chit and
chat like a shuttlecock. Viking light came in
long, low slices across fens cleared by
Dutch Elm Disease. You caught it in
your Elnette-set, ash-gold hair, and smiled it
down to me. Your sagging elbow skin
irresistible. Holding the shape of my molding
pinch. For a while at least. When I was told,
in art class, I didn’t cry. But everything is
clinkered. It is remarked that your wild,
whooping laugh, the line of your chin, and
ambition do live on. Also, that I pine and paint
too rosily. But even though perspective
broadens with knowledge like how,
because you were touring, you never visited
mum, only five, in hospital with ears so sore,
she cried for bars and bars; I still karve
my way back across the water to look
for you, to tell you my stories, in
the last shard of that late afternoon,
in the orchard, in the summerhouse.
Dr. Alice Twemlow is a Research Professor at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK) where she leads the Design Lectorate, “Design and the Deep Future,” and an Associate Professor at Leiden University where she supervises PhDArts students whose research explores, or is conducted through, design practice. www.alicetwemlow.com