The Cycles of the Ring

I’m driving down a country lane straight as a rolling pin. It crosses flat fields undulating with mournful high grasses and green-to-rusty gold crops. The horizon wraps them in fluffy but menacing clouds, wind and rain bashing the car windscreen.

But what transfixes me, keeps my eyes open to the point of watering and my heart -pounding with sheer panic, is the tornado funnel in the very middle of the not-so-distant horizon.

My hands sweat on the wheel. Where am I going? I don’t really know; something just tells me that I have to keep going. There is no shelter in the middle of this flatland anyway. Added to the sharp knifing of fear, my soul twists in the poisonous breath of guilt.

“I need to reach safety; I must take her to safety.”

She’s there, in the back seat. Quiet, serein, even smiling with her gentle, inward smile while her big light-brown eyes glide over the raging landscape outside. As if looking at a painting of a storm from the comfort of an art gallery.

This is the picture I see then and still do in my mind’s eye – a picture that epitomises the very essence of my Grandmother.

Ladylike, hands crossed in her lap, relaxed and noble, face floating in a soft but tight cloud of pure white hair over her favourite navy polka dot dress, she turns her bright gaze onto me. Her reflexion in the top mirror – in full contrast with the tornado funnel approaching down the road.

“You will do everything right. I have faith in you. Have faith.”

Her words sound so unreal, I am almost amused in the middle of an inward scream that I would not let out.

And soon afterwards, somehow, just as it always happens in dreams that repeat their incursion in my life, I drive past a stile.

We turn into a field, possibly towards a farm. I see nothing like a farm in my dream, I just feel this deep, oppressive mass of guilt and fear dissipate like a cloud broken by the sun. And somehow, I drive us out of danger, to an unknown place symbolised by that stile in a field that we pass in the car, the memory of the tornado wiped with the last drop of rain on the front windscreen.

It’s been a while since I dreamt the last of this repetitive dream; it’s floated out of my life not unlike some suggestive odours from my childhood that I don’t seem to find any more.

For many years now my dreams have been different every night, some scary, some placid, some completely weird, as my children would say.

*

Driving to work through Richmond Park, as I’ve been for the past 13 years, I was a little put out: my usual lane past Isabella Plantation was closed, to reduce the number of cars since COVID hit this past March. Taking a longer route meant waking up earlier.

But I was ecstatic to find my park open for traffic again. Each day’s journey to work would be bathed in beauty. Such a lucky girl.

On this September morning I glide through the tufts of fern and young, but high and stout oak trees. Their trunks, barely visible behind the round protective fencing against the deer, let through the light of the sunrise like a string of yellow diamonds. The deer lay still in the grass or wander slowly through the pearly morning mist, blackbirds often flipping on top of their antlers.

Then the sky covers itself up and hides the sun exactly as I turn a sharp right at the roundabout and start down the slopes towards the open fields before Sheen Gate. The dark sky begins wrapping the high grasses in menacing clouds. At the bottom of the straight as a rolling pin road there is a moving grey-blue curtain of rain descending over the not-so-distant horizon.

And I remember. 

This is the exact setting of my old dream, or so close to it that goosebumps climb up my back, where I feel Grandmother’s hazel gaze.

I look in the retro visor. Of course she is not there. But there is someone or something with me right now, right here.

The sun breaks slowly through the clouds. I don’t see a stile, but while a small polka-dotted doe crosses the road in front of my motionless car, it looks straight at me. A rainbow arches over the rugby goalposts on the field.

I drive off and through Roehampton gate. I’ve had to come almost full circle in the park in order to go to work. And to feel my Grandmother’s faith in me, on this September school day wrapped in invisible COVID fear.

Her golden ring is on my finger, a circle of yellow gold, reflecting the string of sunny yellow diamonds piercing between the row of oaks.

When I left off to university, she gave me a golden Napoleon. Twenty-two carat, pure golden coin with the French Republic’s Marianne on one side and Napoleon as Director on the other, just a year before he crowned himself Emperor. She gave another coin to my brother. I kept mine safe and loved for many years, always with me after her death.

When I first married, we used the Napoleon for our rings, my husband using the wedding band of his own Grandmother, another piece of twenty-two carat gold. We wore wedding bands melted with the love of the two women.

We had to divorce for reasons unrelated to the two of us.

I could not bring myself to ever wear my wedding band again.

Some years later I remarried. A new wedding ring made its way to my left finger.

But my Grandmother’s gold was at the bottom of the drawer, in a ring that had lived before and beyond my first wedding. 

Last summer I decided I should take the ring to be enlarged and reshaped, to wear it on the right hand. To make my connection to a family and to a land far away from here, a cycle of gold to keep me wrapped in my roots.

Grandmother was part of me again. Real. Reassuring. I wore the ring and remembered.

*

I lost the ring on the last glorious September afternoon of the year, after doing a full Saturday’s shopping at the market, happily working in the garden and on the meals.

For three weeks I looked high and low in the garden where I’d hung for the last time this year our family’s washing. Under our bed and inside my rolled-in socks.

Everywhere.

I blamed myself for wearing the ring, instead of keeping it for my sons. I cried while chopping vegetables for dinner.

Not a week had past and my husband had to be admitted urgently into A&E and operated on. I had faith, I made sure I had faith. He came home the following day, tired and in pain, but cured and COVID-negative.

So I was driving again, down the flatland road through Richmond Park one early October Tuesday morning, missing my parents so badly, the knifing fear for their health was twisting my soul with the added poison of guilt. I had not seen them for almost a year. I could not travel over to them in this COVID-ridden world without risking their lives.

I called them on the hands-free and told them the story of my dream.

My mother, Grandmother’s daughter, ever reassuring when I torture myself over problems with no immediate solution, said:

“Just the perfect dream for you. At every hurdle you see storms ahead instead of proceeding with faith.”

I’d not told them about the lost ring.

So I came home that same night and started cooking dinner. And took the plastic bag with frozen parsley from the freezer. And pulled a handful of frozen chopped parsley out to sprinkle on the stew.

A golden ring reflecting a dozen suns emerged from the green mass. My eyes, misty with gratitude, could not believe it.

My Grandmother was back with me, she’d never left. She’d always been with me.

So, when my young fresher student son phoned to say that he was COVID-positive and had symptoms of the deadly virus, far away from home in student halls, I panicked. I felt the daggers of fear and the poison of guilt bleed my heart to a scream that was hard to contain.

But then I saw the soft reflexion of a pair of doe’s eyes, not unlike my Grandmother’s, on the golden ring.

“Have faith. You will do everything right. I have faith in you.”