Most evenings, Sarah and I sit on a bench by the river, silent. Not because we run out of conversation, but because the children are at school and work can wait.
Just up-river where our daughters tend to swim in the summer, we have a kingfisher nest. When the chicks are hatching the girls tend to stay away, but sometimes, if they get too close, they are circled by two sharp bolts of blue, like spitfires against the water. They move downriver and normal service is resumed.
When they were younger, the girls used to put on mermaid tails and go pearl fishing. They would dive to the bottom and pull bits of a 1950’s car off the bottom which a farmer had put in to stabilise the bank. Now the river is picked clean and the girls are gone for the Autumn.
Sarah and I sit together because it is good, because we have done so for a decade and because sometimes we see something special. A few weeks ago we saw our first otter. Sarah recognised him first, the splash, larger than a fish would make, on the surface. A glimpse of brown. He swam downriver before sitting below us on my swimming stairs. Pausing, I like to think, to digest.
I have spent the last week away from the river, sitting in a different context – waiting for the thrill of finding a violin. It is much harder than sitting by the river with Sarah. It requires more work to manage client expectations and the chances of my ‘otter’ are fairly low. But I need to ‘sit on the bank’. To fly long-haul. Because the violins are out there, and my job is to find them. To dive to the bottom of the river for a bonnet-badge, or to wait by the side for the otter.
Our elder daughter has called our new neighbour ‘Frank’. Frank has not returned recently, but you can find Sarah and me, sitting, quietly, waiting – or in a hotel meeting room… waiting for a different type of fulfilment.
