Time and Motion by Nicky Ndovi

My earliest memories……

The sun shimmers on my skin, my hair blows lazily in the summer breeze. I lurk at the bottom of the garden; my fingernails and knuckles pitted with the dark earth, as I lazily dig for and examine earthworms, and other interesting things that await discovery. My mother is engaged in similar tasks close by, pulling weeds and other intruders from her vegetable patch. I listen to her humming, and watch her throwing the undesirable snails over the garden wall. As I survey my small world, breathing in the scents of apple blossom and warm earth, I feel peace, my mind is conscious of the stillness and tranquility of this time.

My eyes lift up, ears alerted by the sound of the colliery siren. In the distance I see the green of the valley walls rippling and undulating, a patch of black shows me the location of my father, he will already be on the move, the siren has told me that his working day has finished and rings in the new shift of men who will make their way underground, their cage swaying as it lowers them deep underground.

My mother catches me unawares, “come on cariad your father will be home soon”, she says, swooping me up over to sit on the gatepost and await my father’s return. I kick my heels up examining the fresh scabs on my knees; I look up at the lace of the tree branches above me, the leaves moving in the breeze…….

That morning I was a tree, from a small seedling curled up tight on the floor I developed rapidly into a giant oak swaying in the storm. My teacher’s voice had lilted and flowed as she whipped her small charges into red faced leafy and animal dervishes that shrieked and whirled and span about the gymnasium.

I tell my mother about my short incarnation as a tree and how together with my friends we had managed to grow into a small forest which harbored animals and untold mysteries.

My mother laughs, “What will you be when you grow up?” she asks. I think hard…..my imagination fast forwards, the future seems distant, hanging slightly out of sight, but crystallizing into concrete images when I call for them

I seem I answer that I will be a writer a vet and a nurse. My mother laughs, “Just be yourself she answers”…..

A moment of silence and calm, as I remember my earliest childhood events, it always seems curious how time seems to expand and contract, to be suspended and yet still in motion.