Kestor Bliss

Kestor is our place. it’s the place Max took me on our first Dartmoor walk together, the place we got lost in fog together, the place we have walked out children at all the ages they have been. It’s his second ‘home’ tor, nestling above Chagford and Thorn where his Gran lived and where he returned in the years after his mother died and life was hard. It’s a place I have had romantically infused with the presence of the man I love as a child and a teen and a young man for 17 years of my life. It’s a place we’ve talked as being somewhere I may one day scatter his ashes, or he scatter mine.

Last year I sat and sobbed at the view and the things that had happened. We were moved, all of us, to open our letterbox and see our pad, filled with comments and our names at the front, just 6. Before all of everything.

This year our letterbox had gone, or been moved, but it didn’t matter. The girls and Max scrabbled and ran on the rocks and I sat and took pictures. And thought some of my boy and who he would have been on this holiday. I spoke his name out loud to the wind and tried it in every emotion I could think of. Loving, as I’ve done. Wistful. Thoughtful. Gentle. I tried cross and I tried angry and I tried shocked and despairing and outraged and furious and loving and all those many things I won’t ever have to do. And it was good and I liked it and I think the wind took all those loves and tellings off? and ‘you just got caught writing on the newly painted wall’ versions of his name to him somewhere.

I took pictures of the bracelets I wear everywhere to remember him.

I found some grass to whisper to me and found him again. I think we are going to have to move to Devon soon. It seems to be the only place he can reach me.

Then I watched my girls and my husband play and later, when Max fell and twisted an ankle, he leant on me as we walked back to the car. It’s not often he gets to lean on me for support.

It really is such a very beautiful place.

When we go back, we are going to take a trackable Travel Bug we were given on Freddie’s birthday and upgrade our Letterbox to a Geocache. I think it will be a good thing to let a memory of him go there and see where he travels.