November...
...and as we used to proclaim back in the old country, "The nights are fair drawing in!" - which means it's gets dark earlier.
And wintery time is story time in my opinion - although to be honest, pretty much any time is story time really - but I've always loved cosying up on a winter's night, hearing some yarn of times gone by.
My Mum was more of a storyteller than my Dad.
My Dad didn't like to talk too much about his childhood (what there'd been of it.) He'd been evacuated from Glasgow during world war 2, and sent away from his parents to live in the supposed 'safety' of the countryside. In real terms what that meant was that at the age of 7, he left his family and became cheap farm labor.
He returned to Glasgow when he was 14, and took a job straight away.
My dad would never discuss what happened during those years on the farm, not to me, not to my mother, not to anybody, and so those years will always remain a mystery.
My Mother liked a story. She would talk about what Glasgow was like in the old days: about houses they used to live in, schools they would go to, old scandals and suspicions.
Was Aunty Belle really the sister of Aunty Martha?
Was the neighbor in Alford Street really a nurse?
Could the man who moved to Australia all these years ago maybe have been the killer, Bible John?
Stories of old romances, and intrigues, and heartaches and births, and the shipwreck, and the Nazis, and the lost child.
Looking back, I wish I'd been more attentive to the stories. At the time I was more interested in the scandal than in the feelings, more impressed by the action than the detail, and now as both my Mum and Dad are no longer here, questions I would love to ask them will stay unanswered.
I thought about that at the last story event.
One of the storytellers told a beautiful story about how much she loved her Step-Mom. At the end of the night, I watched as an audience member reached over and hugged the storyteller. Thanking her, she explained that she was a step-mom, and that the relationship between step-parents and step-kids is so often wrongly portrayed.
We always film the event, and it felt pretty brilliant to be able to send our storyteller a link to her story which she in turn would be sending to her Step-Mom.
'O wad some Power the giftie gie us. To see oursels as others see us.' as Robert Burns might say. (Translation being - if only we could see ourselves as others do).
I wondered what her Step Mom would see. What a gift our storyteller gave to her parent, to all step parents really.
My Mum and Dad will not hear any more of my stories, and I will not hear any more of theirs, and that is the way of things.
But as I nestle down on a dark winter night to hear a new story emerge for the first time from a student, I am happy. People will come in and out of your life, and that is nature.
Our stories are not just what we are, they are all we leave behind.
Have a wonderful week,
Very best,
Lynn
xox
Novermber Course. Details here.
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