It felt odd driving down the steep hill to Runswick Bay. I had walked down… and back up… that hill so many times before, equipped with a bucket and spade or a fossil hammer, skipping along beside my grandparents. Little legs remember hills and although mine may not have grown much since those childhood forays, they have carried me far away from those times.
I love the Yorkshire coastline and walked most of it as a child, with parents, grandparents and great grandparents and it felt strange to watch the shade of that curly-haired girl walk with the dead on the screen of memory, carried by love and laughter to places that promised excitement and adventure.
In the half-light of dusk, as the setting sun reflected pink and gold into the receding waves, I was never alone. Not only was I surrounded by friends I love and with whom I was sharing the weekend, I was also accompanied by ghosts, animated memories and a child’s wonder.
Call it nostalgia, if you will, a longing for a simpler time when the weight of adulthood did not bear down so heavily on small shoulders. When life was an adventure yet to be lived, innocence as yet untouched by the shadows of human betrayal and trust was still the natural state of an open heart.
But, like a hologram flickering with uncertainty, the images are no longer my reality. There are gaps in memory, the scenes no more than vignettes. I remember the words that were spoken, but many of the voices have been lost to time. I can still hear my grandmother’s rich chuckle, I can no longer hear my grandfather’s voice at all… it remains only as an echo, a feeling, a taste in the heart.
Continue reading at The Silent Eye
Sue Vincent's Daily Echo 
Beautiful!
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Thanks, Gary.
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Nice Post, Sue.
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Thank you.
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Good post, Sue. I live in Newcastle and it is good to know you are my neighbour. 🙂
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Not any more, I’m afraid… I live in the south now, sadly.
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I feel that way whenever I visit New York, especially the city where I grew up. I wouldn’t want to live there now, but so much of who I became started in the big city. The museums, the theaters, the ballet. The man who sold hot chestnuts in front of the big library with the huge stone lions. Walking through the snow with my mother, linking arms and looking at the windows through the falling snow on Fifth Avenue. Not Yorkshire, but still full of ghosts.
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I was a city girl too… and that vibe and those memories always seem like Christmas, somehow. But I wouldn’t wish to live in a city again either.
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I should mention that when i was growing up, the museums were free — all of them — and if you showed up at the last minute, you could always get a ‘standing room only’ seat at any theater or concert or ballet. You can’t do that anymore. I can’t even THINK about doing any of that any more, but at least I have the memories.
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Same here. And when I started work aged 12, the place I worked put up posters for the theatres, for which we got free tickets. I didn’t get the tickets for the popular stuff, but got front row seats, right next to the orchestra, for the ballet, the opera and all the Shakespearean plays that no-one wanted to see. It was a fabulous education 🙂
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I used to study ghost science, if you can call it like that when I was younger..
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There are a good many mysteries out there that still defy expanation.
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Yes, a lot of them. These, so called parapsychology areas are just waiting for the right time and methods to evolve and bring us the best results of the world in the unknown…
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I hold that if something can be experienced in this life, it is part of our everyday world… even if we do not yet understand it enough for science to dismiss it as ‘natural’
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