Coming Home

I felt as if I was 'coming home' when I returned to the town which has half my family living in it. Mum, my Sister and two of my children and several grandchildren all live in the same area. Yet It wasn't 'coming home' in the end. It was a visit. A very welcome respite from current situations, a genuinely heart warming experience.

I met old friends and I reconnected with people from a long distant past and found a welcome there too. I even managed to see an old BF and thanked my lucky stars he was exactly that past, over , 'old' :) in the end it was a lovely time all round...but it wasn't home.

What felt like 'coming home' was the moment I hit the A55 and headed back to Harlech. I resented the miles between me and the place I have come to love so well. A place not only of beauty and warmth but where I believe my heart has always belonged. Somewhere in my genetic makeup is my 'Welshness', some sort of blood tie, family connection that goes back into the annals of history.

I was delighted during my visit to my daughter, to discover the actual address of my Great Grandparents, they lived in Trefynnon (Holywell to the English) and the very fact that I just wrote that sentence tells me a multitude of tiny little things that make up a wholeness of who I am. 'Trefynnon' , 'the English', it says it all, I am removing myself from the 'English' side of my genetic makeup. Not in a deliberate attempt to become an English/welsh mix...I am trying to find where i really am from...not in a birth style but in my emotional and blood tied manner.

I drove through countryside in England and it didn't feel like anything other than pretty, nice, preferable to houses and factories. I drove through the welsh hills and my heart squeezed with joy, with a feeling of rightness. How strange to see a land I only ever visited as a child for holidays as my home. As the place where I belong, where I connect not only with the sight and sound of a language and a peoples and a land but that I connect with the 'feel' of the place.

It is there in every step I take along the beach. I am sure there are many places that look just like this beach here...but they won't 'feel' the same. The hills I see with barren rock scattered in disarray across heathland and moss can look deceptively like the Lakes but it isn't and it doesn't feel like The Lakes either. The light is pink tinged in The Lakes, here in the Welsh Hills there is a luminosity , a lemon/gold/white glow that emanates from the reflections from lakes and streams, waterfalls and glinting dew. A necklace of mini rainbows reflect through the air and glitter in the corner of your sight, drawing attention to pocket sized images of perfection.

Of course there are scars on the land, slate and coal scored deep and angry ravages across hill and valley but it seems to me, that such ugliness, as necessary as it was in the times it was done, serve now only to highlight the beauty of all that has lain untouched for centuries. A setting of mankind's deprivations wrought like so much tarnished gold to set the jewels of the land in greater beauty still.

I once climbed Cader Idris, I tested the old legend, To climb and stay in Cader Idris was to tempt the old curse or blessing, you would be either mad or a poet when you cam down. I KNOW some may be tempted to say I am mad, to want to stay in a village where work is scarce, where rain can lash like a whip across the landscape, where the very Welshness of Gwynedd can and sometimes does repudiate the English, sending us back to England with our tails between our legs. But i would argue the case. I feel like a poet.

I have words inside me that never before found a way to be spoken. I write with a poetry of its own of this land, its peoples and my own 'Welshness' my own need to connect.

My Father and his family have the Welsh connection, my Mother and her family had the Scottish and Manx connection. perhaps one day, I will visit Scotland and find I can't leave that place without the wrench Harlech causes in my heart. Then truly I will be divided against my blood ties one side against the other....I hope not. Yet for now, I feel the deep pull of this beautiful country and its unique and endearingly proud peoples. I am grateful for the links I do have. I am proud my Father and my Greats and Great Greats come from this land...it is part of me, part of my fulfillment.
Part of my poetry.