Most of her 94 years had been spent in this beautiful little corner of the world. The rear of her property looked up to the Cross on the hill above, and now that most of her days were spent with resting in bed – she found this a favourable view. In the Spring and the Summer months, she watched the little birds and then the wild geese as they came to visit in her back yard and the fields beyond.
It hadn’t always been this way. In her younger, vibrant days she had worked on the farm, and later in the Cooperative shop on the village High Street.
She had been born into a place that had meant the most happiness and therefore, had never wanted to leave. She had been married for a short time, there had been no children, but she had accepted that fact and moved on with her life. Her husband had always wanted sons and daughters and had eventually found a family with his second wife, in Hastings.
In all her 94 years much of it had been spent looking from her window on to the passers-by and their changing tastes and fashions - and as the older residents had aged and passed on, so the village constantly invigorated itself with newer, younger dynamic families. Most of these folks now worked in the city, and as such spent much of their time commuting. She had been lucky. She had found everything she needed within reach. Not many had had that chance.
But the main thing that preoccupied her thoughts was the magic in this little haven. Her great grandmother, a woman who had been there at the opening of the Co-op shop - in the same year that Queen Victoria had died – had always told her the same sentence over and over again, ‘Shoreham finds you, you don’t find Shoreham’.
She had always wondered what that had meant – but it wasn’t about the likes of herself or her family, it was about the souls who thought they had discovered this hamlet by accident - a lucky accident – but an accident all the same.
Yet she knew the truth. They came here incomplete, or sad, or single, or unhappily married, or sick, or healthy, or hopeful, or lost – and they stayed long enough to put things right in their lives. To find that special person, or to lose the wrong one. To beat the depression or some disease or another. To raise a family, or find a new one. To see the end of loneliness in the company of new friends, or to find a confidence when it was lacking.
Whatever their needs, Shoreham grabbed them as they passed by, then dusted them down and didn’t let go until the time was right for them to move on.
She had seen it time and time again – enough to know that it wasn’t a fluke but a certainty - a miracle.
It was a truth that not everyone came to the village searching for something, but most of them did. They just didn’t know it.
And from her little window on the High Street, she had watched them find it and had taken comfort in their happiness, and their newfound lives.
Now from her bedroom window, she watched as the geese came to the field beyond the trees.
Those beautiful birds waited on her to close her eyes for the very last time, and then they carried her soul, to that far country where she could rest.
bobby stevenson 2020
To all those who found it. x
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