Violet’s Journal

T HURSDAY , 17 TH O CTOBER , 1929

Today is the first day of the month of Kartik, in the season of Sharad or early autumn. This is a beautiful time of year, perhaps made all the more so by the fact that Hemanta and Shishir – the seasons of late autumn and winter – will soon be here. I think I’m looking forward to my first Himalayan winter with equal measures of fascination and trepidation. My main consideration will be keeping Themi warm and well fed.

My baby flourishes. She’s a darling, loved by everyone in the village and passed from arm to arm by the Sherpa mothers who are helping me learn how to raise my child. Dawa and Palden continue to help and support me. Their kindness and generosity are quite astonishing, and I must confess I feel closer to them than I ever have to my own parents. How can it be that these two people, who’ve only known me for a few months, so readily welcome my presence in their lives? Perhaps it’s simply the Sherpa way. Acceptance is an important foundation of their faith and that enables them to focus on the day-to-day challenges of having a warm shelter and food on the table each evening. Surviving in this place, on the very edge of human endurance, strips away any unnecessary pretensions and preoccupations.

It’s the season of the harvest and, whilst the nights are bitterly cold, the days are awash with warm sunlight. I turn my face to it, knowing I’ll store these golden moments away, just as we store away our caches of foodstuffs, to help sustain me in the months ahead. We work in the fields every day gathering in the crops, digging up the potatoes and preserving everything we can forage in preparation for winter, and all the while Themi snuffles and coos contentedly, tied to my back in a shawl of soft yak’s wool.

When we’re not working in the fields, Dawa and I carry armloads of washing down to the ice-cold river in the valley far below the village and then lug them back up again, damp and heavy, to be spread in the sun to dry. Fetching water is another daily chore, as is gathering juniper twigs and yak dung for fuel, and preparing and cooking meals. And so I hardly have a moment to think and I fall into my bed each night to sleep in the sweet oblivion of exhaustion. But I welcome that because, at the moment, focusing on the simple tasks that need doing each day helps me to walk through the pain and grief of losing Callum. It’s the way we do things here in the mountains: slowly, slowly, one foot in front of the other.

It’s hard and sometimes lonely too. But the reward for this hardship is a freedom to be myself, unlike any I’ve known before.

When the harvest is safely in, I will ask Palden to show me the way back to the valley filled with flowers. This will be the perfect time to start mapping the botany there and to collect seeds from the purple cranesbill and blue poppies that I saw growing there in such profusion back in the spring.