From Mango Chutney to a Landscape of Trees

Well I slammed in the ham then wrestled with it again the next day by coating it with mango chutney. It looked so pretty and after it was cooked, I was so proud and then I asked Kev to carve it……it looked pitiful after that! All that hard work and many hours Oh well it tasted good.

So our get to-gather was fun. We aunties insist that our children should have that family contact and we use to be involved and allowed to partake in it all; now we are pushed to one side and our conversations are commandeered by our children’s views. This is something we as young mothers didn’t anticipate though as middles aged parents we are learning to enjoy. The ability to talk as an adult with confidence in those important teenage years, sounding out their thoughts and then having to defend them; without the teenage attitude they save for their parents, is a wonderful thing to be involved in.

Those fruits of our labour; that we carefully over many years nurtured, watered and weeded, now stand as trees in their own right, we still have to prune the odd branch so they don’t end up lop sided and sometimes they have to be cut down to size but they most certainly have began to take shape. It also has to be said that they in their turn prune back the odd branch of our life tree and in my experience; this can be done quite severely. But if they didn’t take the time to prune them or we refused to have them cut, they would stand forever in our shadow and be weedy and unstable in their roots. We do make a wonderful forest, not sure which of us is the Big Old Oak, the Weeping Willow or the Wych-hazel though but together we make a jolly good landscape.

Don’t quite know how I got from mango chutney to a forest but there we go that’s how ‘Tilly’s Flights of fancy’ work!

The poem ‘The New Paths we Take’ Also works on the idea that our thoughts and dreams are like the branches on a tree. It can be found in my blog archive.