Sunflowers

Last year, moving patio furniture around, I found a scattered pile of birdseed beneath a storage chest, where an opossum had ripped into a bag I left out. 

I swept the dregs off the edge of the patio and forgot about it. 

Some point last fall I noticed some oddly thick weeds springing up at the edge of the pavement. Took a closer look, and realized they were as-yet non-blooming sunflowers, sprung from those scattered seeds, straight from the thick sod. 

I’ve only ever tried to grow sunflowers once, and only because someone gave me a pack of seeds. They didn’t make it, and…I wasn’t cut up. 

The truth is, they’ve never been a favorite flower. They’re so big, and ostentatiously sturdy, somehow, in a way that clashes with my English-garden-aesthetic fondness for floral delicates. And the color…all I can think of is Orwen, offering a magic potion you can sprinkle on daffodils to take away that “bilious yellow”.

I like pansies and petunias, sweet peas and delphinium and all the other frilly pinks and purples that wilt in our heat after April. Yellow, if I choose it at all, is something to add to the mix for contrast. 

So seeing these uninvited guests popping up in a neglected corner too close to the house to mow over gave me a twinge of irony. But I never discourage volunteer plantings. Any not-weed brave enough to germinate in the middle of a St Augustine lawn is worth granting it its chance, for sheer grit. 

So they stayed. The flowers bloomed, yellow heads bobbing cheerfully before folding themselves away. I smiled over them, and again, forgot about it. 

Fast forward. A weird winter, with multiple record-breaking freezes that killed my tropical heat-loving stuff. Puttering around in March, I noticed a cluster of new sunflower stems coming up where the former ones had been. And, further away—further, I thought, than I had swept any of those seeds—two more stems, double the height of the others. 

I waited. Both these newcomers grew to be four feet tall. One grew the standard large single bloom. The other budded out multiples and seemed to add more buds daily, branching out behind each “main” flower until its stems drooped with their own weight. 

That was last week. Now the original cluster is blooming. The first flowers are heavy seed-heads, preparing to drop another crop. I am unexpectedly delighted by them, by the thought of these cheerful, relentlessly sunny giants continuously reseeding themselves all along this portion of my yard, until the whole narrow passage between my wall and my fence is nothing but a yellow jungle. A bilious, bouncing yellow sea. Bring it on.

This is the part where I would, previously, have tied in some kind of pretentious moral about unexpected beauty and blessings where we didn’t ask for them, and hearts changing toward previously-unappreciated things. Maybe that’s all in here, somewhere, or maybe I’m just enjoying watching the blooming of things i didn’t have to plant or nurture or labor over and…oh. 

Yep. That’s definitely it. 

And it’s enough. 

Who Am I without This Part of Me?

A few weeks ago I wrote a long lament on facebook about the death of my creative drive. Which I should, maybe, chronicle here, in the interest of keeping the story coherent, but...I don't feel like it at present. 

 /stares at opening paragraph. recognizes the point./ 

 Anyway. The resultant grapevine set in front of me a study wherein some psychologist found that people who had been through major trauma and processed it through writing about it were better able to cope with life than their cohorts who did not carry out the same exercise. Some underlying theory about how the brain did not fully "let go" of the experience until it was recorded in words. And apparently it was not enough to talk about it. According to some commenters who claimed to have been part of the study, it was not even enough to type it out. It had to be done in handwriting. 

 (I have thoughts about that last bit, being rather addicted to typing over writing, but I'll pass that over for now.)

 It makes me think back to my obsessive journaling in college and young adulthood. I still have them all...dozens of books crammed with my thoughts and experiences over five years or so. I've never re-read any of them. The couple times I picked one up and scanned it disabused me of the notion that what I wrote was all that interesting, and beyond a few nostalgic sighs and chuckles over a few passages, my chief emotion was embarassment. It was all, as the young folks say, very cringe. We really are quite foolish at 19, 20. 

I don't think anything I wrote then was trauma-processing, though I had plenty of it to process. I think all my trauma came out in fiction-writing. Fanfiction, more specifically, since that's been my primary creative outlet. I poured all my childhood abandonment and abuse into a character backstory, and all my hopes and self-actualization into her triumphant escape. I gave her the adulthood I wanted--one that I did mostly achieve for years. But I haven't been able to write, now, in over a year, and I wonder if it's because my own story has turned down a path on which I can't bring myself to carry her along with me. One of us needs a happy ending, but imagining hers no longer brings me the joy it once did. 

 My initial post spawned a lot of comments from folks of a similar age undergoing similar adjustments. This had its pros and cons. Misery does love company, and there was comfort in solidarity--but it also felt demoralizing, a sort of confirmation that this partial loss of identity must be inevitable somehow if everyone experiences it. I was assured that creativity doesn't die but often just takes a new form, as though even the Muses obey the Law of Conservation of Mass. But I'm not sure I feel the truth of that settling anywhere. When I lie awake at 4 am, lost not in the vivid fantasies that once sustained me during such moments but in a spiral of anxiety and grief, it's hard to believe in any hypothetical future phoenix buried somewhere beneath the ashes, biding its time. 

 Problem is, this spills over into practical areas. Loss of creative energy seems comorbid with loss of physical and emotional energy, and impossible to know whether any of them are causative for the others. Maybe it's a physical issue underneath everything; maybe if I could just sleep decently, everything would improve. But wish in one hand and spit in the other... 

 Forcing myself to write anything at all feels like maybe the only thing I can do, so here I am. I was going to say "shouting into the void", but it feels more like just...whimpering into my coffee. Which is still, perhaps, healthier than following my impulse to go say all this to chatGPT just to have something to talk to that responds like a sympathetic adult.

Resurrection

/pokes dead blog

/ponders

What does one do, with something so defunct?

Facebook ruined everything.

Or maybe it was just life, moving along at its breakneck pace, or me, realizing that most of what I used to write was pretention trying to be profound, written with the full awareness that I was writing for an audience (and still am, I suppose, since if I were really doing this just for me, I'd pull out the hand-written journal gathering dust in my nightstand). I don't actually expect anyone to read this now, though. And that's fine.

It was fun, for a long time, facebook. I even printed a couple years of my feed into books, and they're fantastic encapsulations of in-the-moment thoughts, funny things the kids said, commentary on the big socio-political events of the day (often more pretentious garbage on my part; I hope this realization means I have grown wiser, but it's probably just perimenopause activating whatever hormone is responsible for knocking me to the Gen X side of the Xennial spectrum, wondering why I ever bothered to care that much). But it's not really that fun anymore. So many have left that used to interact, replaced with bots and ads and ragebait.

The last five years have been a mess. Everyone knows that, of course, but it's on a personal level, too.

The Artist suffered two more strokes in 2021. These, unlike the big one in '06, were miniature...undetected, unsuspected, beyond a day of odd behavior and mild symptoms completely unlike the first. With the result that I went for over a year just... wondering what had happened. Why my affectionate, brilliant, driven genius of a life partner suddenly became apathetic, unmotivated, and immune to all exhortations to engage with his family, logging off at the end of his work day to spend six consecutive hours binge-watching television, while I homeschooled children and tried to keep every housekeeping, budget, and maintenence ball in the air with zero help. I thought he was in a depression, hardly surprising during what was still the height of covid restrictions... the lack of meaningful work from the company, the absence of the energy and excitement of his colleagues... surely once the world recovered, so would he.

But it didn't happen, and didn't happen, and... Finally, his sister's observations brought details into clarity that I'd been too close to it to see, and off we went to a neurologist. The MRI made it instantly obvious. Three strokes. A muddled mess of prefontal cortex, trying to function. We were told he could improve, IF he'd follow the steps outlined in the doctor's instructions: basic steps of good diet, healthy exercise, meaningful mental engagement, social activity. All the things, in short, that he lacked the executive function to carry out, since what little he had to begin with as an ADHD-creative had been completely wiped out by the brain injury.

Somewhere in the course of the next four years, I got tired of beating my head against the wall. He was either incapable or unwilling to change a thing. All my pleading just resulted in resentment on my part when it fell, fruitless, to the roadside. Our old life--all its passion, its single-minded communion, its liveliness and health--was gone.



And soon, so was the stability. A few months after remote work ended and all were called back to the office, his company...That Giant Entertainment Behemoth Which Must Not Be Named... terminated him in February of 24. Suddenly. Maliciously. He could, perhaps, have fought it with an appeal to the ADA, since all they cited as reasons were direct results of the strokes. But he had never told anyone about them, afraid it would be used against him by an upper management that already had a vendetta thanks to his lack of tact in calling out the social engineering agendas the brand is now infamous for. They finally found their excuse. Gone, after 34 years... no farewell party, no thanks for everything, no severence pay. Multiple lawyers saw that 500 lb gorilla's name in our query and threw up their hands.

There's not much a 60yo stroke survivor in a niche field can do to start over. So he retired. Took his pension early, and filed for disability, which we miraculously got on the first request, thank God.

I had sought a job the previous year just to get out of a house that increasingly felt too small between remote school and remote work. There wasn't much I qualified for, with a graphic design degree, after spending 16 years homemaking, childrearing, and drawing a non-profit digital comic book. Our church hired me as a secretary. It's part time and unbenefited, but it got us through the first terrifying months until his benefits kicked in. I freelance illustration at my office there, because otherwise I'd be sitting watching youtube once the bulletins were printed, and it has kept us solvent. They are good to me, and I do not take it for granted.

It's been as hard on the kids as on me; the boys were just entering their teens, just when boys especially need a dad to show them how to be men, and he just...checked out of their lives, with no explanation. There is no healing or "moving on" from endlessly encountering this teenager-like stranger in my husband's body; no end to the need to be patient, be strong, be the adult in the house because you are the only one that actually functions like one. There is just living with who he is now, and trying to find enough similarities to who he used to be to maintain points of connection. Trying to direct my anger and resentment toward what happened, instead of toward him. Reminding myself that if the positions were reversed, he would do the same for me, because that was the man he was. Wishing there was someone in my life who would take the reins, just for a day, so I could rest. I have not slept a full night in four years.

I have a few close friends who know how it has affected me. His family knows. He has zero social life now because he doesn't go anywhere, so few of our former friends have any clue.

For the first few months after the job loss, desperate to fine any good in it, I threw myself into a fantasy of finally moving out of state. I've hated living here for 20 years and we were always stuck because of his job--too specialized, too specific to transfer anywhere except to another area I would have liked even less. I spent months pinning properties on Zillow until the map looked like the Appalachians were bleeding. We decided we'd let the kids finish the school year and then pull up stakes.

Our daughter rebelled. At thirteen, your friends are your whole life, especially when the rug has been pulled out from under your feet at home. When Dad and I left for a scouting-the-landscape road trip to Virginia, she spiraled into an anxiety attack so severe she couldn't eat, and I had to fly back mid-journey to pick her up and bring her back with us. Over the rest of that year, many things fell into place. School successes that had seemed out of reach for the oldest son. Social stability and a resurrection of old passions that had seemed to die, for middle boy, whose sensitive spirit had been hit the hardest by all the changes. People in unlikely places stepping up to me with encouragement. Eventually, I recognized the work of God in all of it.

Stay, He said. Stay here.

I grudgingly obey, not without hope that once the kids are done with school and entering their next phase, I can resurrect the dream of returning to mountains. I cling to it, in fact, even knowing that by then one or the other of them will probably have put down semi-permanent stakes here, either via career or relationships. Middle boy already thinks he's found Ms. Right, and I approve of her with all my soul, but she's got too much family here to dream of leaving. Eldest son graduates this year and has zero clue what to do with himself, so he won't be moving out any time soon. My danger now is the temptation to cling to them, make them into my emotional supports because their dad no longer fills that role, and I recognize how unhealthy that would be for them, these nascent men just guessing their way forward.

I miss being near my own family. I miss cousins and aunts and uncles and my physicially and emotionally distant parents. I hate getting older, realizing it's already begun: the slow kicking away of every pillar of my childhood, and the regret for all the times I should have put my foot down and said, "no, this year we are going to travel to see MY people" instead of defaulting to the in-laws at everu holiday to avoid the guilt trips, so that my kids would have had a wider foundation on which to build their identities, and know where to turn if it all goes south.

And it may. His official diagnosis is vascular dementia, which has an average 5-year survival rate... not because the dementia is that severe, but because the vascular events that caused it are a ticking bomb, waiting to go off again and finish the job. He is doing nothing to prevent that possibility, and I can't force him. I'm already having to meet with lawyers about how to protect our assets from his gullibility, or if he winds up needing a level of care I cannot provide. I never thought I would be having that conversation in my 40s.

I'd be lying if I said I never cried for hours in the middle of the night. If I claimed not to know that I waste so much time online because it's an escape from a life that feels empty, compared to what it used to be.

I do a lot of going through the motions. Doing the things that must be done, for no other reason. Maybe it's enough. All my favorite books are period children's literature, classic YA fantasy and coming-of-age heroism, in which the main character slogs through life-altering hardships making the right choices not because s/he knows how it will all end but because they are the right ones. Maybe it's dumb and weird, as a grown adult, to think about Sara Crewe handing her bread to a starving waif or silently enduring being scolded and cuffed because she's pretending to be a princess. But somehow it still holds up, even though my own pretender has gotten rusty.

They knew something, those authors.

I guess I should start reading again. But for now, maybe writing is a good first step.

Magical Journeys: Cardigan Bay, Wales

And four years later, she realized she never finished chronicling that trip...

I'll save excuses and reasoning; there aren't any, really, and it's been so long now that there's been a second trip, involving Scotland, and rental cars, and further adventures. Also we brought children, which means the chronicling had no time to be literary, and the pictures are not as nice but no doubt far more authentic. But the spirit moves me, and I should finish this travelogue before moving on to another.

...ahem. So, Cardigan - or Cardigan Bay, to be precise. We hopped a bus in downtown Dolgellau, and I wound up chatting for a couple of hours with some lovely elderly folks in transit, who were delighted by our tales of adventure so far and complimented my pronunciation of the town names we'd seen, so apparently all the corrections of our hosts thus far had been effective. Another bucket list item checked.

Arriving in Cardigan Bay, we met our hostess, Penny, at the head of the street upon which our lodging resided...

She claimed you could drive down this street. I remain skeptical.

Penny's AirBnB turned out to be yet another brilliant find, which has, since our stay, made it onto the front pages of tourist magazines and websites. She had several independent apartments; ours happened to be the suite nestled in the top floor of the building, which meant the ubiquitous exposed beams figured prominently and you can all just come back for me later, thanks...

I'll be right here.

Our skylight looked out upon rooftops and seagulls. That tiny window opened upon Penny's back garden, and though when the British say "garden", they mean "yard", in this case it really was a garden: a brick and stone-walled tangle of floral wilderness in the best traditions of cottage gardens, complete with benches and hidden crevices and scattered with hundreds of years' worth of the evidence of humanity - in some cases, literally. Penny explained how during her excavations she had uncovered a human femur at one point, called authorities, and submitted the area to an archeological excavation which determined it to be several hundred years old, probably a relic of the last siege of the town. 

There's something rather thrilling about standing in a place where oppressed people were tossing body parts hundreds of years before the American rebels were tossing tea into Boston Harbor. 

Slightly less exciting than human femurs, but also less prone to forensic experts showing up.

 Penny herself was a kindred spirit. A creative and artistic hostess who organized art and film gatherings for her acquaintances, she decided within minutes that we were part of her tribe and worth an extra mile. Or ten.

Probably because of moments like this.

 To our astonishment, after our initial icebreaker in her garden, she determined that our interests could not be served by mere public transportation, and promised that the next day she would drive us to several area attractions we would enjoy.

Accordingly, after a quiet morning expanding our palettes with scotch eggs and turkish delight in the market streets below us, we met our hostess and crammed ourselves into her tiny stick-shift for another vicarious lesson in navigating single-lane roads. Within a few minutes we were in the town of Cilgerran, home to the castle of that name.

Psh. A summer home. 

Clearly where Escher got his inspiration.

Penny. Note her shoes and skirt, important features to consider later.

Among Eilonwy's talents: carrying a candle on her head.
Mental note: Pay a real photographer next time.

Smaller, and set among less dramatic scenery than the other castles we had explored thus far, Cilgerran had its own charm - not least its relatively low crowds. I pulled out my costume pieces, much to Penny's amused delight, and we got a few more good shots.

She does not, however, iron her gowns. That s*** is for people who sit around embroidering cushions.

He was keeping me from going over the edge again. You know, as one does. Sums up the whole trip, really.

Cilgerran conquered. Where next? During our previous chats, I had expressed a little disappointment that our route did not take us near Puzzlewood Forest, a tourist attraction I had seen advertised during my planning for the trip. Penny scoffed. Puzzlewood, shmuzzlewood. She could do better. Back in the car we piled, and into a labyrinth of hedgerows.

Our hostess parked in what looked like the middle of nowhere, a hilltop surrounded by sheep pastures, got out of the car, and took her bearings. "It's been a while since I've been here," she explained casually. "I'm trying to remember the best route." In her sandals and denim skirt, she set forth across the uneven muddy ground, in reckless disregard of sheep dung, thistles, and nettles. We followed her, tromping along, and she blithely answered my anxious questions about whether the field owner would mind with bemused answers that finally clued me into the realization that private property notions are utterly different in Britain than they are in America (in short, in a "walking holiday" culture, you are legally allowed to walk almost anywhere as long as you don't molest people's animals or stroll into their houses and barns. Silly me and my ridiculous modern notions of land ownership!)

After a few minutes' indecision Penny resolved that we need to cross a barbed wire fence, which she proceeded to do, in sprightly fashion, despite her skirt and unprotective shoes. The Artist and I had somewhat more difficulty, but we finally wound up on its far side, crossing a small hill and then...entering fairyland.

The magical, mysterious, dark fantasy of Ty Canol woods awaited.

Hidden away from roads and villages, a tangled mass of gnarled, twisted trees, boulders strewn like marbles under smothering quilts of moss, under a dark and silent canopy, this place was the stuff of legend. An obscure and nearly-hidden plaque near its entrance explained that there were species of lichen and moss that were found only here. I'm pretty sure there are fae creatures also only found here, and that they would have liked to eat us for dinner.

This was after he'd spent a hundred years feasting inside that mound behind him. We're just purely lucky he emerged only five minutes later, human time. 

I did feel like I needed to ask the tree's permission for this. It said okay, because I was polite.

This tree wants to hug you. And squeeze you and pet you and love you and name you George. 

So...

....many....

...textures.

 Penny watched us with delight as we exclaimed over every new view, and we spent an hour exploring. I made many mental notes of the mood, the angles, the smells, knowing it would inform both my writing and art in future projects. But the day was waning, and we had more to see.

Next stop, a true tourist attraction: the remnants of Pentre Ifan, a neolithic burial chamber. I had seen photos of this one and wanted to see it up close, my bizarre attraction to standing stones already being well-established. At this point, we were on a time crunch and moving rapidly toward sunset, so after a short photoshoot we wrapped up this spot, denying my desire to sit and soak in the mysticism. I made up for that later with liberal application of photoshop to my images.

Not bad, but...

Oh, see. That's more like it.

Everyone's a comedian. He's pretty cute, though, so I'll keep him.

 Onward! I wanted more coastline scenes, and Penny delivered. Off we drove to the coast of Pembrokeshire, and...

Oh.

Hi, I'm Pembrokeshire.

Oh...

...are you okay?

glruh

abughbuh

meep

Everybody stand back and give her some air.

WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME ABOUT PEMBROKESHIRE.

I kid, of course. This type of thing was also on my bucket list. I just wasn't prepared for the levels of gutpunching, heartbreaking, breathtaking gorgeousness it would be, and how much I would want to weep at what a short time we were able to spend there. The sun was sinking so fast we were racing against the clock, so I dutifully donned my costume one last time. Because as much as I wanted to just be...listen, my 30s were ticking away, people, and so was this trip.

I am ignoring the swarms of flying ants I was sitting amidst, and that, my friends, is called good acting.

That expression is because somebody suggested it was time to leave.

A sunset farewell, fitting for our last day.

I am not an amazon. Penny is just tiny.

This one was Penny's idea.
Moon goddess, which if you know the mythology here, was brilliant.
Shame the light didn't allow for a really good pic at this point.

I am the blue speck back there. This was on the beach below. We build sandcastles in America, but welsh kids, I guess, are like "castles, pssshhh, we have plenty of those, you know what we need more of? STONEHENGE."

Exhausted but happy after a thoroughly delightful day, we headed back to town and treated Penny to dinner, trading email addresses and planning to stay in touch. I realized at this point that if we ever returned, we would definitely need our own vehicle if we really wanted to experience more of what these places had to offer - we'd have never been able to see all this without Penny's generosity and set of wheels.

We slept, we rose...the next day we bussed to Fishguard and caught the ferry back to Ireland.

Fishguard. Quaint and...fish-guardy.

There's not a lot to say about the rest, from this date, although I do remember some craziness about getting from the ferry port to the train, a night at a Dublin hotel, an uneventful transatlantic, and more idiocy at the Toronto-Pearson airport where we almost missed our connecting flight again thanks to the massive amount of inefficiency.

But we did, eventually, make it home to our nuggets, with heads and hearts full.

In the end, I still can't say if this trip was more for me or for the Artist. He swears it was the most magical trip of his life, and although he does properly flatter me like any wise husband, I suspect he is sincere. We've been a lot of places since then, including the family trip I mentioned in the intro to this, but never on any trip where the elements conspired, after near disaster, to fall together with such a perfect combination of places, people, and experiences.

It's 2020 now, and I'm writing this on the 40-something-eth day of the Covid19 lockdown, wondering fatalistically if we will ever be able to travel past our city limits again without fearing for our lives. It's an interesting, bittersweet experience to look back on this, to have seen news reports of wild goats wandering through the streets of welsh villages in the absence of human activity, to know that the skies over Britain, as everywhere, are clearer and fresher from the absence of travel and manufacturing pollution.

I don't know what the future holds for us. But somehow, I am comforted, when I think of these places, the history there that has survived for so long and will continue, Lord willing, long after we are gone, the moss on the mountains, the trees quietly growing under the mist, before us, without us. One day even this blog post will disappear into the ether, for even the almighty internet is but a blip on the timeline of the universe. But for now, for me, it matters. And so I record it. For myself, and for others who may stumble upon it, seeking magic.

May those who wander, find what they seek.

~Dawn

Magical Journey: Part Six - Adventures in Dolgellau

Railing and bussing out of Colwyn Bay on a Sunday turned out to be a hungry experience; there were very few (read: none, to our perception) open restaurants on route. Apparently the post-church Sunday lunch rush is a phenomenon unique to America, where some people still actually go to church. We tightened our belts and decided to sit back and enjoy the view, which was getting progressively less New England-ish. As we traveled south, the land waxed rugged and stony. Trees thinned, and the slopes around us rounded and covered themselves in brushy heather. It was more like what I'd imagined of an ancient land, helped along by the occasional tangible reminder, mixed in with modernity.

Might as well build a park around the stone circle. Why not? 

Dolgellau (it's impossible to phoneticize the pronunciation of this: the best I can do is "Dol GELL hie", in which that double "L" sound is created by holding the tongue at the roof of the mouth and blowing noiselessly - it's not quite an "L", not quite an "H", but something in between, utterly alien to English) was a charming and picturesque little village obviously not much changed in a few hundred years, already ancient before America was a spot on the map beyond "Here be Monsters." Every structure was constructed of the same grey stone, shaped or unshaped, the walls bedecked with flowers and flags, with odd character-filled corners and gables and dormers and towers and I am so discontent with modern architecture right now.

I only noticed later how the stonework on the far left goes from natural uncut stone to squared-off bricks halfway across the building. There's a story there. I wish I knew it.

A few views around the center of town...

We had to get dinner before we could go up to our BnB, which was three miles out of town, so we picked a cozy ground-level coffee house that called itself Y Sospan, and yes I DID choose it as an homage to Dianna Wynn Jones and Howl's Moving Castle. For the uninitiated, "sospan" or "sosban", as it seems more frequently spelled, is exactly what it sounds like in English if you say it out loud, and the song "Sosban Fach" which Calcifer sings to himself in the book, is a real one. To my delight, everyone in the restaurant was speaking Welsh except us. We got some curious glances.

I can't remember what I ate. Probably another Ploughman because CHUTNEY.

After dinner we telephoned our hostess because we couldn't find a taxi, and she graciously drove down and picked us up. Olwen was cordial and professional as she told us all about the area and its attractions, and gave us a brief history of her inn, which turned out to be quite the find: without question, the most luxurious of our accommodations.

Tyddyn Mawr. Those are our bedroom windows on the first floor.

The artist enjoying the view from the french doors.

Olwen's daughter's harp. I hopefully told a few bald-faced lies near it. Strings remained disappointingly intact.

Settled in craggy mountains like a gem among stones, Tyddyn Mawr could not have been in a more picturesque place. The slopes of Cader Idris, the largest mountain in the area, rippled down almost directly to the set of French doors in our room, barred from our wandering feet only by a pasture of grazing cows and a wooded stream (not that either of these would have presented much of an obstacle, but for the rigid "no trespassing" rule drilled into me as a child). The mountain's local legend as the seat of a giant who held court upon it, and that a night spent upon its summit would render a mortal either a poet or madman, added to the romance of the view.

The ruggedness of the mountains reminded me strongly of my family home in Colorado, but no slopes in the arid Rockies bear the green velveteen coating that softened and muted every ridge and edge of these peaks. Patches of purple heather broke up the green, and even on the highest shoulders of the mountain, the stone fences wound their way upward, ceasing to mark off their territory only where the grade became too steep to bear them.

We arrived with quite a bit of daylight still to spare, and after exploring the grounds, the Artist took a nap in a deck chair on the patio and I took a walk down the road, scattering sheep, who waddled away bleating. Strolling between stone walls thickly overgrown with honeysuckle, pausing to pick Scottish thistles and sample wild blackberries, I composed fanfiction in my head and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Dessert.

I walked less far than I would have liked, for knowing it would worry the Artist, and made it back to our room in time to watch the sunset kiss the mountains goodnight from a v-shaped notch in the peaks to the west. Every western ridge blushed gold in the light's embrace as the gorse brush seemed to catch fire, while intermittent patches of purple heather smoldered to near fuschia. I danced around the back yard of the inn, camera in hand, trying to capture the magic. You can't quite catch lightning in a bottle, but sometimes the embers fall in and glow for a while.

The next morning was bright and clear well before 6, but breakfast wasn't until 8:30, so we opened the French doors and pulled the armchairs out onto the patio to enjoy morning cups of Earl Grey. I continued to log the trip while the Artist read a biography of Errol Flynn that Jane had given him, and occasionally read a particularly outrageous paragraph out loud to me.

"Did you know he was a degenerate womanizer? History is awesome."

Breakfast was enough for five hobbits, courses of unlimited carbohydrates and fat in the form of buttered toast, muesli, croissants, three types of homemade jam, local honey, sausage, bacon, eggs, yogurt, fruit, juice, and tea. I reflected with amusement that I do not see many very thin locals, and comforted my own guilty conscience with the reminder that we were planning a very long hike later in the day.

Before the carnage.

After.

We chatted with the other patrons of the BnB, a mother and daughter on a short holiday, who eventually offered to give us a lift up the road to a walking area around a pair of lakes, which Olwen had recommended as a beautiful spot. Olwen eagerly pointed out on a map that we could walk from there to the seaside town of Barmouth, where we could catch a bus to Harlech. This seemed a good solution, as I wanted to hike some natural scenery while the Artist was keen on visiting another castle, and we had not thought it would be possible to do both.

 
We re-packed our backpacks with necessities like my Eilonwy wig and costume and neglected the luxury of bottles of water, because priorities, and hitched the offered ride.

I took a lot of pictures from the car window. Our driver was amused.

The area around the lakes was as lovely as Olwen had insisted; undulating hills and ridges and peaks moving off in every direction, with two good-size lakes mirroring the sapphire sky.

Yes, there are two lakes, I can count. Only one of them made it into this photo.

On the way up we drove past a monolith and I almost hyperventilated. According to the map there were several in the area, and I had goals of getting near one. As soon as we were out of the car and had spent a few minutes orienting ourselves to the lay of the land, I insisted on going back to it. The Artist protested a little about the long walk ahead of us and the fact that there was a castle at the end of it, but I set my teeth and he relented, admitting that Harlech was not going to get up and move while we shot. We hiked around a small hill, trying to avoid the omnipresent sheep poop, along the edge of one lake and back to the stone I'd seen from the car.

Here I am. Hullo.

It rose steady and immobile, straight up from the ground, a single finger pointing to the sky. There were several other large stones nearby, though it was impossible to say whether they were part of the  arrangement or just a piece of the landscape.

Though the car park (this is British for "parking lot" - see how well I acclimated?) and its surrounding area had been moderately crowded with other sightseers, this side of the hill we were on was devoid of human life other than a lone fisherman by the lake. Nevertheless I still used my now-perfected method of modest quick-change artistry to get into my dress, and the Artist laced it up and helped me place the wig. I dug through the bottom of my backpack.

"Oh, s**t. I forgot my bauble."

Artist smirked. "Is that what Eilonwy would say?"

"She would swear like a sailor. She probably said all kinds of things you can't put in a children's book."

He laughed. "I wonder how you say 's**t' in Welsh."

"Probably 'swyt'. Just add some y's and w's."

We were both laughing at our silliness at that point, which is the only way to handle standing around in a medieval gown and obvious costume wig in a public space without feeling like an utter fool.

 

To the great delight of the locals, it was brilliantly sunny and clear with almost no wind. Unfortunately for my pictures, these are the worst possible conditions for photography. (All right, except for actual gales or tempests, thank you, smart alecks in my audience.) I had expected, not without grounds, a more mysterious, misty setting, and had spent a crazy amount on raingear - so was disappointed at a certain level, but Nature does as she pleases without consulting my playbook. We made the best of it.

And even Mother Nature can't conquer Photoshop. This is the only shot from this spot I did some post-editing on.

It's also pretty hard to be disgruntled about anything when this is your view.

The Artist made sure to capture local flora as reference shots. Here we have thistle...

...and gorse. Milne was not BSing about those prickles, man. Poor Pooh. 

We snapped pics for an hour or so before I switched back to my civilian clothing and we headed back to the lakes. On the way, we met up with a group of about eight white-headed ladies hiking down the road and chattering away in Welsh to one another. They noticed our accents and began asking questions, and we had a sweet little dialog. I know we took some photos with them, but sadly, have not been able to locate them in the mountains of digital data we returned with. It appears most of the shots from the Artist's iphone from this day were lost, somehow.

When we asked where they were heading they laughed blithely and said they didn't know. I hope when I'm a crazy old faery crone I can still hike around in the mountains with the same motto.

"That's the great thing about wandering...

...You start out and wherever you end up...

 - there you are.' (Fflewddur Fflam, paraphrased).

The Artist and I headed northwest and began descending. The moment we stepped through the gap between two hills, the sea became visible, a swath of blue bay far off, with the white specks of architecture freckling the bluffs on the near side. I could see the bridge to Barmouth crossing over to them; it looked like an insurmountable distance to cover on foot in two hours, which was what we had left to get there in time for our bus to Harlech. Nevertheless, as we had no "plan B", we stepped out, thankful for that hobbit-sized breakfast.

That grey line across the blue inlet is the bridge. Just a stone's throw. If you have a missile launcher.

Descending past old stone huts, half tumbled-down, surrounded by grazing sheep and white stones jutting like broken teeth through green velvet gums, I thought of the hero's journey in Taran Wanderer, and had to keep stopping to take more pictures of these perfect settings. If Disney defaults their shooting of the potential film to New Zealand, the fantasy film location du jour, they will have passed up some golden opportunities here (particularly as I would imagine it would be much cheaper to film here, unknown and unspoiled by the moguls of Hollywood industry, but what do I know).

We entered a wooded area as our altitude dropped; very different woods than we'd encountered in the north. Those had been very brushy with undergrowth, very dark and thick-canopied; these were "cleaner", the trees a bit thinner, filtering light down through many green dappled layers onto a ground carpeted in moss and fern.

Moss. MOSS, MY FAERY SOUL. I WANT TO ROLL IN IT.

Makeshift bridge of sidewalk slab and stone.

The ubiquitous stone walls still barred us from leaving the road most of the time, and as we got further towards civilization, it was occasionally broken by doorways or gates, always locked, or nearly-hidden stone stairways, covered in a year's worth of dead leaves, leading to nowhere or....anywhere.


























Once we came upon a sharply peaked, dark rooftop standing ghostlike under the trees, its upper portion just clearing the visibility of the fence. Its gothic, pointed window frames identified it as a church, and as we got closer we could see that several of the slate roof tiles were broken and missing. Through the hole we could look down into the empty hall. Shafts of pale light filtered in from the empty doorway opposite our viewpoint, illuminating rows of empty pews. The growth of everything around it suggested that nobody had used this building in half a century or more. No signs or markers identified it. It just stood - an empty shell, monument to a faith dead or moved on.

Selfie on the trail, because now and then you have to prove it was really you taking the pictures. 

The road going ever on...

Down and down and down some more - first hour up, I realized how foolish we had been not to bring water; we were both sweating and hot, even in the now ever-present shade. Blackberries grew thick alongside the road and I picked and ate them continuously; I wasn't hungry, but the juice was mildly thirst-quenching. We finally got into the village at the foot of the mountains, a rambling, unorganized collection of cottages bearing the odd name Arthog. There, our quiet mountain road joined a somewhat busy thoroughfare, though at the moment the traffic was being held up by a road re-surfacing crew. We paused to watch them lay gravel for a few minutes; the Artist took some pictures and one of the workmen, noticing this, grinned, turned around, and favored us with a cheeky dance.

Get it? Cheeky? You see what I did there? 

We confirmed with one of the workers that we were still on the right road to Barmouth since at this elevation we could no longer see miles ahead. The road became less pleasant to walk at this point; the usual stone walls bordering it meant there were no shoulders to walk upon, and every time a line of traffic approached, we had to stop and squish ourselves apologetically against the wall, trying to avoid the blackberry brambles and stinging nettles.

This stretch seemed interminable. There wasn't much of a view as we were down amongst wooded lots, and though the scattering of cottages in rows, with their jumbled messes of roses and hydrangeas and lavender gardens, were charming and picturesque, there wasn't too much variety. We were hot, tired, and thirsty, and beginning to realize we weren't going to make our 2 o'clock bus from Barmouth. There wasn't anything else to do but go on, however.

At one point a small lane pulled off to the right from the main road, so small it looked barely more than a driveway, and had no signs marking it as anything particularly important, so we skipped it and continued on while I stuck my nose in the map, trying to find something that looked like it matched. About a quarter mile later we realized we'd gone too far. That unassuming lane had been our turn. The Artist said some choice words and wanted to turn into the field on the other side of the wall; the constant anxiety of avoiding traffic was making him cranky. I refused to walk anywhere but the road, on the basis that it was impossible to tell where you'd come out if you started cutting through fields, and that often the wall bordering them was too high to climb over if you suddenly found yourself needing to escape...say, from angry Welsh bulls...or angry Welsh farmers on whose land you were trespassing.

He said some more choice words and forbade me to post them on Facebook. I laughed and ate blackberries all the way back to the lane, where we turned and headed west at last.

In less than a mile we emerged from the woods, and an open bay stretched before us, water glimmering between vast sand flats bordered by rows of dunes. A footbridge spanned the distance, leading toward the village of Barmouth, which from here was clear was a beach resort town somewhat gone to seed, but still quite busy and crowded. Rows of multi-storied apartment buildings in the bright pastel colors typical of seaside resorts layered themselves up the slope of the hills behind. Sailboats were thick in the deep part of the bay, and families were playing by and in the water on the far side. People were biking and walking over the bridge by the dozens and we quickly started across.

Despite being the shortest part of the journey in mileage, that bridge felt like it would never end. The sun beat down and there was no wind at all; it can't have been more than low 80s in temperature but between our jeans and backpacks we weren't getting much air circulation. When we finally got to Barmouth, we headed straight for the nearest pub and downed two glasses of ice water. It was dark and cool inside, an old place lined with beer-bottle candles, ceiling strung with faux greenery and fairy lights. The Artist ate lunch and I picked at his chips.

I don't know if it's really the last Inn, but we'd have gone in anyway.

The Artist attempting British manners. He was better at this than the accent.

There was another bus to Harlech within the hour so we hopped on. Thus began an adventure into feats of wizardry unlike anything I have ever encountered, as the bus driver, weaving in and out among the cars parked on both sides of the town's narrow streets, made the vehicle do things that were physically impossible for any bus to do. It wound like a snake between its obstacles, as though it were made of multiple rotating sections instead of a 50-foot solid frame. It was instantly obvious where J.K. Rowling took her inspiration for the Night Bus, the magical antics of which no longer seemed quite so outrageous - obviously running up on sidewalks and forcing entire buildings to squeeze out of one's way being all in a day's work for these drivers.

We made it to Harlech miraculously in one piece, and took another hike up a hill to visit the castle, another of Edward's impressive fortresses. Built on a ridge right upon the water, where it could be supplied directly from ships on the bay, it now stood high and dry as over centuries the waterline had receded to its present state a mile or so away. Between castle and sea, a swath of very green, rippling dune-like low ridges marched down to the water.

There was a short film playing in the visitor's center, and I peeked in and watched the first five minutes or so. Thrillingly, it began with an image of a smoking cauldron, glowing in red firelight, boiling and trembling until it cracked. The next image was the mountainous coastline, with a huge, crowned and disembodied-but-alive head resting upon it and smiling benevolently out at the sea. I recognized both images as references to the Mabinogion legend of Bran the Blessed, the son of Llyr - confirmed by a plaque outside that explained that this was the very bay where he had greeted the king of Ireland, and agreed to the ill-fated marriage between said king, and his sister Branwen. Typical of all such legends, it ended it tragedy and war, because Celts.

Less massive and less well-preserved than Conwy, the castle was still a great place to explore - and this time I had brought my costume. We were there only about an hour before closing so it was, thankfully, not very crowded. We found a relatively secluded spot - probably the original kitchen - for me to change, and went out to get some pictures, drawing the usual bemused looks from onlookers. One woman, however, was full of friendly interest, and began shouting posing tips to me as I ran around the walls. She came up and started asking about what we were doing, and before long her whole family was there and I was showing them images from my Facebook page; she was writing down my screen name and the Chronicles titles to look them up at home - my second apparently successful evangelization of the Prydain books among the Welsh.

Castles are just prisons where they make you wash your hair and curtsy all the time.

Our good camera had a dead battery so we had to rely on the iPhone - God bless the people at Apple who keep making those phone cameras better and better quality. The Artist bravely conquered his vertigo to follow me up to the highest walls and get some shots of Eilonwy looking out to sea, pining for freedom. If I had to pick one castle for cosplay, I thought this one particularly appropriate, given the location. It made a perfect stand-in for Dinas Rhydnant.

Unfortunately most of these also seem to have been part of the collection that was lost that day, and only these two shots have survived (and only because I edited them on my phone and posted them to various social media while we were still there.)

"Carrickfergus" would really just be excruciatingly appropriate here...if only it were Welsh instead of Irish. BOO!

When we finally left the castle it was closing; we rushed out to the bus station only to find that the last bus had left over an hour before. Plan B? There was none. We trotted down a road lined with BnBs and the Artist suggested asking a local proprietor the number for a taxi service. We turned in at the next place and the hostess, a lovely woman named Bridget, kindly called one for us.

Our taxi driver was thrilled to find herself transporting a Disney costume designer, and spent the time sharing stories of her family experiences at the Orlando parks and the undying thrill of that most American of experiences: shopping at Wal-Mart. We made Barmouth just in time to catch our bus back to Dolgellau.

Dinner in a local pub called the Unicorn:

Hamhock, chicken, and leek pie. American pot pies are sad, depressing replicas of these.

We called another taxi to bring us back up to our lodging, thankful not to have to walk another quarter-mile on our aching feet, and were back in time to have a cup of tea on our deck and watch another sunset bid goodnight to Cader Idris.

I found out the following morning, while chatting with another couple who had stayed that night, that Tyddyn Mawr is one of the most highly-rated BnBs in Wales, consistently rated top of all the "must-stay" lists, and almost always booked months in advance, they'd had an awful time trying to get a room and asked how on earth we'd managed it. I'd had no idea when I booked it on AirBnb; just had loved the look of the setting; one more happy "accident" in the arrangements of what was turning out to be a series of such.

On to Cardigan!