I can't begin to fill in the gaps

So as you may well have noticed, before my little Crete "journal" there was a not insignificant gap of about 8 years! (It actually really doesn't feel that long, but that's life as we know it) 

 Can I fill in all that time with you?

 Not really. But I can begin to tell you about a few journeys that seem to have happened almost without me knowing.  

It's quite strange to realise that it is only 4 posts back that i shared my poem to Mum that i had written for her funeral.  That makes it feel more recent than it is.  It will be 10 years this November.  But although she no longer inhabits this same time and space continuum that I do, it often feels like she has had a hand in things that have happened in the intervening years.

For example:  Only 6 months after i returned to my little cottage in Guildford, my lovely neighbour passed away.  I was quite devastated as I had been away in the last years of her life and although she had plenty of people to help, we had often gone to do the grocery shopping together and such like.  

The knock on of that, was that someone wanted to buy her house and really wanted mine as well, to be able to rent them out together.  As much as I had always loved that house, it was on a particularly noisy junction, and returning from the Sussex countryside after living with Mum and Dad for those 2 years, it had become apparent that I had lost a great deal of patience for noise and cars and traffic jams outside my front door.  So, in some ways the timing was good.  But it was still soon, and i was still bruised and tired and Dad was still in the care home in Guildford so i knew i didn't want to be moving away anywhere.  

One conversation led to another which led to another, and to cut out all the middle bit, I ended up buying my sister's bungalow as they were ready to find a different family home as the boys headed towards their secondary school years.  

And the point? Well the point was that despite the neighbours death being in March, and probate and all that had to be sorted, and negotiations and conversations....... our completion date for me to move to sis's bungalow and she to move on up the road (just a mile, we can still send smoke signals)........ our completion date was 2 days before the first anniversary of Mum's death in November.  It kept us busy enough, it gave Dad a focus and some fun in planning our DIY projects, but we were in and done by the day itself, to be calm but distracted just enough.  It took the sting out of that first year.  And in turn made the date a happy time, new beginnings. New Challenges (plenty of those to come!) 

I thought at the time I was buying a short term home, somewhere Mum knew and had been to in the years sis lived here, which felt nice for me. I wasn't ready to be somewhere she didn't know.  But it turned out not to be just moving house; it turned into a whole new chapter....... well several if we are honest ;)

'Til soon ❤️