Status Updates From Coming Home

"Who was it who said that marriage was a summer birdcage, set out in a garden? And all the birds of the air wanted to get in, and all the caged birds wanted to get out?"

"It's important, always, to have something to look forward to."

Friends are wonderful and sympathetic, but they can only be wonderful for just so long. After that, if you go on complaining and moaning and being sorry for yourself, they get bored and stop coming to see you. You have to come to some sort of deal with yourself. A compromise. If you can't say anything cheerful, then don't say anything at all.

At the edge of the sea, bordered in pale pink, the detritus of fragments of shells, washed up by the breakers. Exotic shells, a world away from the homely mussels and banded wedges of Penmarron. Here lay shards of conch and nautilus, scorpion shells and cowries. Ear-shells with their mother-of-pearl linings, and the lethal husks of sea-urchins.

Nancherrow was constant, and she was going back, to that place of comfort and warmth and luxury, where responsibilities could be dumped overboard and one could revel in the sensation of being a child again.
Just for a few days. It was probably all going to be dreadfully sad, but she would be there…