Saturday, 30 August 2014

Isabel was either writing or thinking about writing and she wrote many different kinds of things. Among these were her stories for children and I've reproduced one here in the hope that you might read it to a child in memory of Isabel or any other lost loved one.
              The story is taken from a collection of ten entitled "A Woodland Journal", which opens a window into the life of the hedgehog Genevieve Hedgley Hogg and Ottersby a befriended otter.


                                                           OTTERSBY'S DRAGONFLY

               A little bit quite before the mid-of-the-day, Ottersby sploshed into the cloudy-green for his swim-time up the upway of the stream for the surprise-catching-out of a fat-lazy-trout.
               With his paws a-paddle beneath the cool and the summer warm upon his back, he kept a tidy pace on the exact mid-line with his special V-shape ripple a-rolling out from each of his either sides to the backwards and outwards, to the east bank and the west bank, making all the river his own.
                 In the flash-of-a-blink out of the corner of one eye, Ottersby glimpsed the hitheree-ditheree hover-dance of the delicately beauteous-ful dragonfly and changed his direction with a roll and a dive to resurface wet-nose-first beneath the jewel of all the flies for a closer close-up spy.  She hitheree'd and ditheree'd all garmented in shiny rainbow and kingfisher blue and Ottersby was entranced in a dreamy trance until such time as off and away she flew.
                 Ottersby scampery-skipped up the bank and through the long-sweet grass that edges the river's edge and trot-trotted into the woods to a place where the wood-chop-men had not very long ago been.  He picked up a tiny-pointy piece of charred-cold wood from the wood-chop-men's old-burnt-bonfire and sketched himself his very own dragonfly onto a roundy slither of the pale inside of tree. Then he mosaic'd his very own dragonfly with the pretty petal pieces of bitter-sweet-forget-me-not-Rosebay-willow-herb-robert and varnished them down with the sticky clear resin from the fir cone tree and for his finally finishing touch he dippy-dipped the endmost tips of his whiskers into the ashes of the wood-chop-men's old-burnt-bonfire and finely traced the faint fairy filigree of his dragonfly's wispy wings.
                All gleamy-eyed with pleasure and pride he raced home to Genevieve his most favourite Hedgley-Hogg and showed her his very own dragonfly to be forever kept and forever seen where he bang banged it with a nail to the wall and when his tummy rumble-tumbled with the forgetting of the catching of the trout, Genevieve served him with an especially fat slice of devilled worm pie with mint and rocket salad and they toasted Ottersby's dragonfly with an especially old and favoured vintage of rosehip and crab-apple wine.

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