A Girl Named Audrey

It’s early morning as I wake up at Mama’s home in San Juan Tenerife, and for an instant I am the nine-year-old girl that fell into a fitful sleep all those years ago, exhausted by the minefield that is The English Christmas (see post Little Bird). I am now A Girl Named Audrey, for this is the name I go by in this newest stage of my life. Audrey is indeed still that same child, only the unremitting passage of time spanning a seemingly endless journey of forty-five years separate us. Simplier put, I grew up; as well as daughter to Mama and Papa and Sister to Sis, I am now also mother to Hugo and Sofia, aunt to Zara and Alicia, and friend to many; along that seemingly endless forty-five-year journey, the desert of loneliness mercifully ended. Once-upon-a-time, before The Tsunami unleashed its colossal walls of water radiating out across oceans and wreaking devastation on everything that stood in its path, I was also once a wife. 

Across from me, still fast asleep in the bed on the other side of the room is my soon-to-be twenty-year-old English niece, Zara. Drained by the adventurous drive of the previous day across the island with her beloved Mummy-Aunt as I am known, alongside the exhausting adventures of her ever-youthful and energetic Spanish Grandma (see post The Beach Club), she recovers on this day off work at nearby The Blue Lagoon Hotel. Soon two years will have elapsed since she arrived on the island, exchanging London for Tenerife and her Mama for mine. I gaze at this young explorer beside me, and detect the same lust for adventure which propelled Papa in the prime of youth to take his young family to England (see post Share The Moon) and in doing so began the dispersion of its members to the far-flung corners of Europe that we today call Home.

Mama is now seventy four and pottering in the kitchen, busying herself with breakfast for her daughter and granddaughter. It helps to take away the pain of Papa’s passing soon two years ago (see post Share The Sorrow.) The family years spent in England now feel like a distant dream, for in old age Mama and Papa indeed made the return journey back to our Island, where the majestic Teide Volcano silent watched over them in old age just as it watched over me on the day I was born. Sis did not join Mama and Papa, for she had already met the English man who would eventually become Zara’s Papa. As for myself, I had already long left England heeding Great Grandma Celia’s advice the night she visited me in my dreams  to spread my wings and learn to fly (see post Little Bird)

I do not have long left with Mama and Zara, for this is the last day and the last morning of my vacation. The time has now come for me to begin the long return journey to that other place that I now also call Home. Mama and Zara may be living on my island, but I am still just another visitor, always destined to leave. My prayers as a nine-year-old were eventually answered: I indeed flew away to a place where Papa no longer scared me, and to where I was no longer ashamed to say that my name was Maria del Carmen. But I did not return back to my island home of Tenerife as expected, rather I carried on flying further north, up towards the Arctic Circle to a yet another new land and yet another new adventure

The plane has just taken off from the southern airport of Reina Sofia and begins its steep ascent into the clouds. Soon only the exposed peak of the Teide volcano portrudes out from between the clouds, serving also as a reminder of the Spanish fragment of me which stubbornly refuses to vanish. The seat belt sign is soon switched off and I take the opportunity to make myself comfortable; it's going to be a long journey of nearly seven hours. As I recline back in my seat, I shut my eyes and reminisce on those early years of the late nineteen-eighties preceeding the move to the place that would become my new Home and the time when fate destined that Axel and I should cross paths. 

Next post : 25.3.2018 :  Canada


Note: All written content is the intellectual property of this Author. Image material is drawn largely from Pixabay with some additions from private family archives.