Soup By Volume Two

Soup By Volume Two

  Copyright Lisa Southard, 2014

  A second collection of eccentric, pragmatic, imaginative encounters with everyday life from the Wishbone Soup Cures Everything blog. Wishbone Soup is an edible metaphor for finding happiness in a variety of circumstances. Not the blank happiness of owning stuff: the deep real kind that people need if their lives are going to hold meaning. Through the medium of everything; spider webs, frozen fish, a glove with a hole in it; contentment and jolliment appears.

  'If you find the right path, climb the mountain in flip-flops.'

  On The Menu

  Words From

  2012

  Chapter 1:OCTOBER

  Chapter 2: NOVEMBER

  Chapter 3: DECEMBER

  2013

  Chapter 4: JANUARY

  Chapter 5: FEBRUARY

  Chapter 6: MARCH

  Chapter 7: APRIL

  Chapter 8: MAY

  Chapter 9: JUNE

  Chapter 10: JULY

  Chapter 11: AUGUST

  Chapter 12: SEPTEMBER

  Chapter 1: Words From October 2012

  Steel Yourself

  This morning, three stems of fluffed blonde pampas grass were flicked over the car roof. A car looks preposterous with a wig.

  Mr collects some extra eyebrows on the lane walk, in threads of spider silk.

  ‘Is it fake hair day?’ I ask.

  He only laughs.

  We have four wild strawberries each and clear sight of the river mist.

  This is the prequel, but not to fake hair day. It’s trolley bay day.

  Mr has been clever, asking the supermarket refit manager what will happen to the old trolley bays. We are allocated two. He has put his budget greenhouse plan into action by hiring a van, and then we have panicked. We love the plan, a sublime blend of sensible, imaginative and ratchet spanners, and then there’s that dredging background static, the wearisome fear, the miserable part of a low end income: we can’t afford it, we will be caught too short, in desperation, sink in debt.

  We’ve done it, though, we’ve hired the van, we’re in the car park, wrestling nuts and bolts and several metres of Perspex. A few scrapes and bruises, a lot of hours later, we seem to have won. Boy comes to help, on his way home, steps under the penultimate Perspex sheet in time for the best drama, as a steel arch appears to fall on our heads. It frightens the onlookers, and we are shaken up, even as we are laughing. This fear is exhilarating, liberating. After, ‘oh, it missed,’ there is only one thought in my head: ‘I’m not afraid to fail.’

  Faery Story

  Sticky mud lives up to its name, coats my boots till my feet are near hobbled. Step into long grass just in time; it licks the mud off with soft bladed tongues. Wind my wide-eyed way up to the flank of the corn crop. Here, no human sight can spy me. This is not a people place. The nettles bite. It takes two hands to break a spider thread. The ground lurches.

  Dog is drunk on scents, running jagged. Low-bellied badgers have been here, dragging paths through the crop rows, waistcoat pockets full of cobs. Fox prints ford the stream. For all its fine feathers, a pheasant has a slattern’s shriek. I daydream a house woven from the plants in the centre of the tallest deepest rows, a secret house that sways with the wayward breeze, where I sit with my legs dangling and my hair all tangles and wild sparks in my wide wide eyes.

  Sequel

  This morning, three stems from the pampas clump rest at the back of the car, all bunched up and fluffy: a car with a bunny tail.

  Six wild strawberries, each, are foraged from the hedge.

  This is all we pause for on the stride to Treniffle and back.

  This is Trolley Bay Day 2: this time, time gets tighter…

  We have pushed pennies from jars for a half-day’s van rental. The objective is for one more trolley bay to be in bits in our garden by early afternoon. The cloud cover fails to keep us dry. At noon, the workmen are dragging any unclaimed shelters to the skip, via an angle grinder. Also I must collect Baby from her Nana’s house. Which is why there is a small child in a car seat waving keys and a mobile phone at grandparents who are wet to their undergarments and grimly wrestling twine around unwillingly rolled Perspex sheets.

  Flecks of blood from minor flesh wounds catch in raindrops.

  Such loveliness to be at home in dry clothes not shivering. To drink warm tea and watch crazy Baby put a lead on bemusedly tolerant Cat; change her mind, drape the lead on herself; change her mind, coil it in the fruit bowl and stand on it: ta-da!

  ‘Baby,’ I say, ‘I’m a big fan of your work.’

  Such loveliness: that confident laughter.

  Feral

  Coffee cup basks, sits on my desk, idly steaming. Clouds are lit up, rolling past, processional. Over the river, white birds with sun struck feathers fly.

  I walked Dog up to the cut wheat field, which is part dug over, which is becoming the field where the wheat was. Followed the turned earth, the stark chopped hedge that looks like winter, sharp bladed winter. I heard something; I could believe it was the sound of birds, or I could believe, there, the air warbles. Breathed deep; damp earth fresh sky. Under booted feet a soft soil thump. Three blackberries squish, tangy, in a chomp of molars.

  Back to my desk, to think, to quiver at lists, all the snarly details that aren’t so bad if you just pick through them. Sigh deep: desultory picking follows. I long to lounge and read a book. Naughty eyes sneak to the window. I fidget for more coffee. Hours are slippery, tired, glutinous.

  At the end of a dark drive homewards, reverse clumsily to our front door. Rain falls, feels like fine wet lace. I believe that the night has a different scent, is a different world. The pampas grass, with its slicing nasty leaves, waves, windswept, waves like a beach storm. Drops of coal overfill the scuttle, clack clack clack, while the feral grass communes.

  Beat Yourself Up

  For a competition morning, it’s not too early. Step to the car with the sun raising an orange eyebrow at us, like we’ve disturbed it. A pelt of cloud is slung above the road. I drink thermos coffee, think of this as a travelling café. The cloud won’t fool me: inevitably, if I have chosen to spend my spare day in the maxi-sized box of a leisure centre hall, the sun will rise and stretch and shine. Fire doors are chinked open, to draw some fresh calm in, to release some steam and fear. I see the light outside: I know. But we have our own world in here, our own glorious perturbing friendly fist-and-foot fast wielding world, propelled by lists, protocol, courtesy, the audacious desire to win. The opportunities of losing aren’t always overlooked; a dinked ego can let some good in. (Treat with a sting of honesty, or a balm of the knowledge that you tried the best you knew how. If you’re unsure, you can ask one of our medics.)

  The shiniest medals I saw today were the ones that came as a validation for the confidence to try. The real competition is always with your self.

  Hullabaloo

  Luckily, 4am was a false start. Tucked back in, Baby remembered sleep for a few hours more. Figures of mist drift in the field, later, after toast and egg. Dog gallops through them. I watch Baby in her Wellington boots fall over the tractor tracks. Mud print hands held up: ‘Oh no!’ Her sing-song steps and words, over the embossed earth, under the faint sky. Back to the road, to pretty stomps in puddles. Back to the coffee pot: Granma is flagging. Boots discarded, just a little way before reaching dry land, she takes on tasks: wearing sideways flip-flops, dipping a cup into Dog’s delicious looking water; oh, it has hair floating in it, fascinating, heh, heh, if I turn my back on Granma she’ll never know I am dipping my cup in here for a swig; and what are these books doing, cluttering up the shelves?

  Wry smiling Granma hugs the hot espresso.

  A Hint Of Halloween
>
  All day, a shroud for a sky: does it bode? I don’t wish for it to bode. It is a trick of light, only, an evocative illumination. Yesterday’s figures of mist, drift to mind; reminds me to be respectful where I tread, for the dead are many and life is finite. This land is made of their labours.

  Slugs in the lane are feasting on bits of their tyre-split colleagues. It is the job of a slug, this pragmatic clean up. And since they eat in the road, in the tyre-smoothed section of road, it has a macabre circle of life vibe to it. As a restaurant concept, unlikely, but then slugs are not good at PR.

  There are wild strawberries, in the hedge, still finding enough light to ripe, we pluck out two or three each: carefully watching for traffic.

  Mesmer’s Weather

  Slavish devotion to laptop: rather startled to find there are people talking to me. Apologies, family. And knees: I have ice knee caps. Tellingly, I have remembered to feed the dog. Feed, and walk. This morning, before my laptop pinged on and the rest of the known universe vanished, all I wanted to think of was taking a holiday; flicking lazy feet over warm sand. Me and Dog sent up a neat spray of last night’s rain, there were still strawberries to be found, so I could not think why I needed; it felt like I needed; to skip over a tropical beach. My hand on the door handle as the heavy rain falls. The smell of refreshed earth follows me in. Up to the bedroom to find a towel, and stop, and find that I am caught in the rain, in the lush-heavy sound of it.

  Careless Wish

  This morning, white river mist trims the dark valley slopes: in the sky, gold sorbet cloud. My eyes follow and rise. I receive the sight like a blessing. Yesterday’s yearning for a heated beach is scoffed at. Until I take myself back to our little office room and sit at my desk, then it makes more sense. I’m ready for my reward now, for a shore of cash. Up lights the laptop screen. Bing! I got blogmail:

  ‘Can I simply say what a comfort to find someone that really knows what they are talking about on the internet. More people ought to read this and understand this side of the story. You surely have the gift. I can definitely help you to get your talent shown and recognised worldwide, visit my website: CashLoansForValium&FashionPurchase.’

  Night Journey

  Night comes, all gaping jaws, all flail and spit; I feel it; it holds it does not bite, it will run and I will cling to the thrill of it: the journey has music, a pulse, a suddenness, a storm brewing: it bursts like a bruise, flowing outwards, under tender skin: teeth press the breath from flesh, everything is shaken up; claws snick on tarmac; and I cling to the thrill of it: rain falls, glass rain; each drop shatters, makes slicing pools where the world is cut in two, is turned upside down: here in the teeth of the beast, thrown between worlds; I feel it; it holds, it presses, it could bite; I know this is how the journey goes: at the heart of this knowledge, lodged secure, a strange safety, a strange peace, keeps a steady, quiet beat.

  Soup By Volume 1

  This morning: traded a sixty pence parking fee and a jar of diesel for an hour at Widemouth Bay. Parked south, walked north where the salt spray spumed from every jag of rock. Body tucked in a winter coat, trousers rolled up, flip-flops dumped in the car. Messy waves wash in warm, spread a brief mirror on the sand. The sun is floored, but still untouchable, no matter how much I give chase. The cold wind is what I breathe in, is what sticks to my wet legs as we tread sand back to the car. Put the choky old heater on. Sand is what I wear on my feet to drive home.

  This morning’s journey is the pause I take before pressing the publish button. I’m not sure if it makes any sense, but it feels like a good adventure to have-

  'Through the medium of everything, from a bright red kettle to the discovery of a vomiting tree, moments of brilliance are revealed. This is a diary, a bunch of opinions, a description of many kinds of weather, a writing journey, an enchanting, eclectic jumble, a strong, flexible body of work.’

  No harm done, other than one mild concentration headache.

  Interlude

  The day is a reflection of me; fields contemplatively quiet, sky grey and blue. Mud buffers each boot. I even wonder what to write of, today, and I know that isn’t how this works. Words find me, I am their roost. In my mind, a dull settling. Overhead, a pheasant, thoroughly annoyed. I see the ornamental silhouette, too late for the camera. Dog appears, wagging her tail. Now I am smiling, not thinking, work turns back to play. Here is light, here is shadow, here is the vast spread of turned earth, the warm fertile loosened earth.

  Run my hands through dried grass seeds, a shimmy of a noise. The beginning of music, I think, where things touch, and speak to the air of that meeting.

  Rose Tinted Planet

  Into town for an hour, for serious tasks, such as banking (using financial formula: take money from a, feed b) and acquiring car fuel. Smuggled under my grey suit jacket, a lining of cerise pink satin. Blatant polka dots on a scarf.

  Home to my red and mud coat, home and out: here strolls me, there pelts Dog, through the clasped hand angles of the woods. Under the shaded steep slopes, a hundred tunnels lead to a hundred underground lives: tentacles of a terrestrial alien city. Out from branches, ferns, brambles, crisp fallen leaves, out to the furthest field, to a prairie of stalks: here strolls me, there pelts Dog; soft rain touches, hears my plea for the washing on the line, moves on.

  In the hedge, in warm wraps of sun, bright pops of ripe strawberry.

  Over My Head

  Before the storm started up, something reminiscent of a hand mirror shone in the sky: sat in a dip of salmon coloured cloud, too still for a satellite, it could have been a star. Between the star and the pending storm, the river geese are set a-flap. An apex of them echoes our roof, turns back to the river.

  Lively improvising wind devises trumpety old car horn noises from the forgotten tv aerial: gets a round of applause, after I stop looking for the old car altercation. From the window also see dead branches on the fat trunked ash, dangerously reanimated. Takes my mind off the trouble I’m having with hyperlinks. Every step on the list- ticked. Works fine until I upload it- is lost in translation. Again! Stormy words and childish renunciations- this is stupid, like everything is when you can’t understand it.

  After work, waiting for Mr, I stand in the shivery wind, on pitchblacked tarmac. Everything is rain drenched, except the rustle of leaves above; internal desiccation makes them dry in any weather. Turn my eyes up to the bronze paper leaves of the car park beech.

  (Magic light.)

  Look to the window, momentarily released from a writing trance. Ten minutes may have passed, or a decade. I check the calendar and a watch. Most of two days, it turns out. I think Boy went to school and we had meals, and other things like brief glimpses of star packed sky, rippled cloud. But, for the most part, I’ve been somewhere between 1972 and 1977, between Bristol and Bodmin Moor.

  The window is the room, backwards and blurred by double glazing. It’s October 19th, 2012, it’s nearly half past ten at night. Just for distracting fun, I pull out an old notebook. My handwriting used to be so neat. Here is what I read:

  The spark that removes you from the ‘doctrine of perpetual flux.’

  When everything changes and you change, and you perpetually move

  Your head spins. Centrifuge breaks you up, no hand holds, no connection.

  Without a feel for the eternal, you are lost. You have nothing to compare with, to hold up and say “this is perfection. To strive for.”

  You can never stop the wheel of birth and death spinning too fast for the sake of it.

  Something has to catch your focus. The spark. The inner light that shines.

  Once you’ve seen that light you look for it everywhere.

  You might take the right path, you might not.

  If you don’t hold the light up inside of you it’s hard to see the way.

  You can make a torch from many different combustible things but the light that really shines does not burn, it merely, incredibly, is.

  (Magic light.)

&n
bsp; Add A Solid Fist

  Poor ‘nice’, poor over used, beaten up, inoffensive word. Privately one can use it, but publicly it draws ridicule. It has a taint of helplessness. Add a solid fist, a bag of grit, a pan of glowing cinders; knock off some flimsy pink and sugar: I wish I could recover this word. I would make a nuptial present of it: I know just the people for it. This is what I’m thinking, staring at a blank manila surface, reaching for a pen. What I’m smiling about, as glue and glitter are smeared barehanded onto folded cardboard. Put the card in the sun to dry- nice weather for it. The word is jumping at my heels. So, Dan and Anna, if you are wondering, that’s what your wedding card is all about.

  Bath Nap

  Lead limbs drop in a hot bath. Water slops to the overflow. Steam hangs like a sigh, sticks to the mirror. Incursions of night air, from a thin line of open window, touch cold on heated skin, hold off the tendency to sleep. Floating and sleeping slip together, too easily.

  Spiders and flies make a tapestry, on the white square of ceiling; spin a warning.

  Plug un-nested; drains out dirt and somniferous danger. Weight returns, reluctantly.

  A towel wrapped shadow, in the fogged mirror, slowly combs wet hair.

  In Thrall

  This morning’s suspicion: that the weather is hungover. The sky is a sludge, very much as though head-aching weather has smeared cloud around, thought ‘that will do,’ and gone back to bed. A definite air of not being finished, under which I decide to stroll, maybe towards the river, maybe not, because it is that sort of a day. And while strolling with vague intent, I spy a path, an old path to the top of the steep woods. Dog and I vanish in an oesophageal gap.

  Dog’s eyes shine, borderline demonic, she is on some canine bacchanalia, dancing crazy through the ground cover. I am stomping bramble-gates, sinking in pine needle pile-ups, unhooking from crafty roots. There are openings into the ground, set in the hill, that seem to slide under bedrock, just wide enough to drag a person through. No one knows where I am; this thought comes as a lovely shock. I could disappear. I could live here. It would be simple, in the sense of a matter of keeping oneself alive. That’s the loveliness of it.

  Thumbprints For The Fire

  Car copes with the tractor churned mud better than expected: parked on good anchor points. Mr and I are out whittling firewood from the piles of tree, outside a cowshed, down at new Farmer Landlord’s place. Nosy bullocks crowd to the gate. Chainsaw whirs, logs drop in the mud. I love the earth damp smell. I love the noise of it stacking. Get a bit of chainsaw dust in my eyes, mistiming a leaning in to pick up the rolled away cuts. When it comes to chainsaws there are worse mistimings. An idea has crawled into my head, somewhere along the route from yesterday to here. It’s a feisty idea, so I have to rough up a story structure and start corralling words. But for a while, here, there’s earthy damp air, there’s dropping thumbprints of stumps into the open back of the car.

  What’s My Monster?

  Halloween is creeping up. It’s behind you. Feel the cold wet corpse breath on the back of your neck? The bloodless fingers on your paralysed shoulder? The hot flush of urine that steams in the icy crypt air? Mwahahahaha!

  I love the festival of Sowhain, most popularly known as Halloween. The dead return to visit with you, and you prepare yourself for the travails of mortality. Death is part of life, that’s the short form of the message. The contrast of it is what makes life so valuable.

  Further psychological probing of the festival reveals a need for self-communion.

  At the death of summer days, we have to turn and face the nights. Unless you make like a swallow and migrate, I guess, but that journeying isn’t easy either. Sooner or later there’ll be something uncomfortable lurking in your in-flight socks. Integrity demands you deal with it.

  My worst monster is mankind, for evils perpetrated against everything; lowest of all, cloaked in ideology; and for the fear that binds resistance. Every other fiend is a caricature of human aspects. But however deep in the night we hide, there is always that redemptive pulse of light, waiting. So mankind is my best monster too.

  Blood Mushroom

  In the afternoon, a flock of starlings blackened the branches of the fat trunked ash. I had left my desk to witness the disturbance. The sun shone, and the bird shapes shrieked.

  Last night Mr tried his best not to run over a rabbit. It had a poor instinct for car tyres.

  Leaves fell to our windscreen, pale in the headlights, whirling ghostly. The world was cold and dark and beautiful, the sky thick with dreams.

  This morning we did not go walking in the woods because of the echoing boom of shot. We went to the unturned fields instead, trod badger paths, found an old hedge boundary in a steep neglected copse.

  In the coppice I was looking for a mushroom that Boy and I found, growing in a tree base. Light brown, soft, oozing bright ruby dots. At first glance, it struck us as a recent kill site. But then, on second take, the gently sickened awe, to view stigmatic fungus.

  Things lately have a strange feel, pushing over the edge of eerie, into a kind of aesthetic macabre. This evening the moon back lit mottled deep grey cloud and made haloes and I nearly drove into the hedge. There’s a beauty that can pull the life out of you, not through malice but through profundity.

  Comfort

  On this chill bright day, we have been part of a babble (the word team almost works, but babble is closest) helping Girl and Baby move house. Granny Meg was also celebrating a birthday, so we had oven fresh pasties (Girl burnt her arm) and cake and cups of tea, in between the collapsing of furniture and ferrying of boxes and mixing up messages about what should be placed where and who has the key for which door of which abode.

  Baby cried when her toy box was carried away. She has no idea what the purpose of the day is. The new house has a garden and she likes this very much. At teatime, she rides in her big pink car seat, singing nearly-words, to Granma’s house. There is lamb stew waiting in the Rayburn. Granny Meg sneaks her a bit of chocolate cake. Outside the night rises, the temperature drops, the moon is an ice blue sculpture. Grandad puts extra blankets in the travel cot.

  Sunday Aquanaut

  Unnerved by the house move, rattled with a cough, Baby did not have her best sleep ever. Granma observes the world through tired eyes, it is like looking at the world through a slower medium than air. Baby zips about, tetris fish fashion, Granma lumbers.

  After breakfast Baby diligently brushes her tongue, spits neatly upon the floor.

  Leaves are dropping; lie in ruffles at the road edge. Dog runs and Baby sings. Leaves stick in pram wheels.

  Later, when Baby is dropped home and drops straight to sleep on the sofa in the new front room where a small aquarium blows gentle bubbles, I drive home through a tunnel of trees that are baring branches, curved over the car, a wooden ribcage. Shipwreck; whale; dinosaur?

  Loops

  So much revel in throwing stuff away: to be recycled, where possible, one adds, but the joy lies most in the feeling of having cleared space; yet on my desk is a lightly corroded camera battery that I can’t quite bring myself to drop into the bin.

  Boy has opted to study photography, a balance to his sciences and history. We have dug out my father’s old cameras; an OM10, an OM20, a couple of Tamron lenses. Film is a mystery to digital age Boy, so I sprung open the back of a camera body and yelped because there was a film in it. The odds on there being any pictures are slim, but I shall try developing it. Boy was two when my father died- there might even be a photograph of Small Boy to discover.

  I bought some new batteries to power the cameras back to life. Boy prised out the old ones with a cotton bud, handed each one to me as it came free. Quite corroded, the first three, but the last one had a shiny flat surface. I kept it in my hand. I read it: 357 Rayovac. Dad always liked a name brand. Something talismanic about the thing, like it ties up time, loops two moments; the bearded serious man loading a good battery; the studious young man clearing space.

  (
Alas: the film did not have pictures for us. But worth a try.)

  A Little Flux

  Girl is at the cinema, most likely swooning, first over Bond James Bond, second over costumes, though the order may change. ‘OhMyGod!’ she will say, and the lack of spacing between words here is representative not typographically erroneous: ‘Mum! YouShouldHaveSeenIt!’ I will be on the sofa, mostly half asleep, mostly lost in editing, with one small sliver of me on an inner space search mission, finding the energy to respond. Her enthusiasm will help power it.

  Except, she says, ‘Yeah, it was all right.’ I have forgotten to factor in that she is a mother too and has just moved house. She is more tired than me.

  When I get home I peek at the two pumpkins waiting in the pantry, I approve of my earlier cleaning efforts, I think of the lovely disgusting Halloween story I am going to post up. And take a glass of blackberry wine.

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