Landscapes of Life

She gazed up at the colourful shelves of stacked yarn, when she heard an unexpected voice behind her.
“Miaow. Miaow-ow-ow,” it said. “Miaow!”
An intrusive sort of ringtone, she thought, as it broke into her internal debate on precisely which shade of beige or magnolia to choose for her winter cardigan project. There was a slight feeling of pressure against the muscles of her left leg. Then a pushing, bumping sensation. Ah, she thought, looking down. Not a ringtone. Not a ringtone at all, but a real cat. A confection of a cat, with the darkest chocolate ears and legs, and a head and body of toasted almond, cappuccino and cream. A Siamese cat, with eyes of peacock blue, looked up at her, in a careful assessment and evaluation. She felt suddenly lacking. The cat sat down at her feet, still gazing up.
“Miaow,” it said again, conveying complete contempt as it viewed the yarn in her hand, shook its head and returned elegantly to its bed beside the till, nestling into the silken folds of a tropically coloured cushion. She replaced the yarn on the shelf. At which point had she become the sort of woman who would buy yarn which matched her internal decor? If she were to stand against any one of her walls, she would be invisible. Beige on beige. Off-white beige. Off-yoghurt beige. There was, after all, no superhero that she knew of called ‘Magnolia Woman’. Totally dissatisfied with herself, she closed her eyes.
From the depths of memory, from her childhood decades before, rose the vision of a granite castle, a craggy outcrop with a stream pouring from it, gorse peppering the air on a hill and a deserted bay. A time when she had run, unable to stop, with the curlews calling on the moors, when she had climbed hills, picking darkly sweet bilberries and ran with the sound of bees among the fierce fire of the gorse.
An intense longing to be back there rocked her like the blast of a gale-force wind. Taking a huge breath, she allowed her hands and eyes to roam freely among the shelves, cascading the colours of the cat’s coat into her basket. The softness of silk, cashmere and alpaca cajoled her fingertips; the coolly crisp cottons soothed her skin and her feeling of emptiness. The greys and silvers, the lichen sage greens and rusty oranges formed a small outcrop, hanging over the lip of her basket: her own miniature crag.
She paid for her purchase, sending a grateful salutation to the cat, who ignored her. She drove north, watching the mares’ tails of cloud that foretold wind. She thought of the generations of women who had knitted and crocheted to keep their families warm. Her mother, who had knitted five aran sweaters one autumn for
the family. Her grandmother, who had taught her to crochet and given her an old bone crochet hook, who had knitted a pair of navy gloves for her little brother, and then discovered that the first glove had one finger too many.
“Oh well,” she had said, “I’ll do one less on this next one.”
Now she was the matriarch of her tribe. The elder, the wise woman. A woman who had been the child, the maiden, the mother, and who was now the crone. The adult orphan. But that was the natural order of things. Like the crochet chain from which all other stitches sprang, but which held the work together: the doubles, the trebles, the meshes of filet crochet, the fans, shells, and clusters. The double crochet whose one loop became two, becoming shawls for wrapping babies, clothes and blankets, all from the simple actions of a woman’s hands, a hook and some wool.
She drove to the bay where she had played as a girl and parked in the long lay-by beside the white railings. The tide had left an expanse of glistening, pewter-grey mud. The feeding waders and ducks moved in family groups; the bar-tailed godwit sounding like a Shakespearean insult; the red knot and the curlew sandpiper, their feathers the colours of the clouds and the land. She scanned the elongated oval of the bay, then realised she was looking for something she had last seen fifty years before. The bright pink flare of a flamingo; a bird of paradise among the gull greys. She laughed aloud, remembering her mother’s delight at the sight and her father teasing her about having drunk too much gin, before admitting that he too could see it. The bird stayed for a while before moving down the coast. Later, they heard it had escaped from Edinburgh Zoo. Leaving the car, she walked up the crag which overlooked the bay. To the south-east, the castle stood, solid and immutable. With a randomly chosen ball of yarn and her hook, she allowed her fingers to think for her, shaping abstract forms from chains, slip stitches, doubles and trebles. The hook sang its way through her memories, through the landscape before her. She dipped, like the feeding waders, into her yarn bag and the colours mingled, separated and came together. The fears and happinesses of her life wove themselves together. The clouds: palest lemon, creamy lilac, chaffinch pink, birch-leaf green and seagull-wing grey seeped into her crocheting, always there, always changing.
When, at last, her hands fell still, she gazed out again at the coastline and down at the shapes on the velvety turf. She was going to create a landscape of her life, past and future, and she would look to the sky and the land for the surprising flare of the escaped flamingo. Perhaps, too, there would be a cat with an unexpected voice, who might, this time, approve of her choices.

“I am thrilled, surprised and very excited to be chosen as the winner and danced around my yarn room when I found out! I feel very honoured as I know the standard of entries would have been very high”
Jane Mackey

Find out why judge Mary Ellingham from our sponsors Search Press chose this as our winning entry by picking up a copy of issue 85. Find out more here.

You can read the two runner-up entries here and here.