Halcyon Days

Last week I sat at the end of my father’s bed while he lay propped against his pillows.

Recovering after a week in hospital, he looked very frail. Almost ninety-four, his hands are lighter than they once were and his sight has all but gone, but his voice remains as strong as ever.

We were talking about birds. He asked me if I knew another name for a kingfisher.

I didn’t.

“Halcyon,” he said, without hesitation.

He has always had a phenomenal memory. Years as a passionate crossword puzzler and ardent movie buff have kept his mind active. Even now it moves quickly. He can recall the date a film was made, who starred it in and the books they were based on.

Halcyon. He seemed pleased to offer it, as though passing something small and intact into my keeping.

Later that afternoon I went for a walk to clear my head. It was a solitary walk along paths I had known as a child. Not long into the walk it started raining, heavy drops bouncing off my coat. I kept going. About a mile in, the clouds lifted as abruptly as they had gathered, and a rainbow showed itself against the bluing sky. The weather righted itself. Calm returned.

Halcyon days.

I had always taken the phrase to mean a period of peace and calm but when I got home I looked it up. The roots lie in myth. Around the time of the winter solstice the halcyon kingfisher was believed to lay eggs in a floating nest on the Aegean Sea. For the seven days of incubation and a further seven days after the eggs had hatched, the halcyon was said to charm the sea into remaining unnaturally calm.

This fourteen day stretch of still water became known to sailors as halycon days, a time when there was little threat of a storm and safer passage.

At the longarm, I have known both seas.

There are days when the machine runs like a charm. The thread holds. The tension balances. The motor hum is steady, and the quilt moves beneath my hands with a quiet confidence. Those are halcyon days at the frame. Work unfolds without resistance. Decisions feel clear.

And then there days when we navigate troubled waters.

Not long after I got my first longarm it shot a bolt. Quilting one moment, then a terrible clang and rattle. The machine stopped and I froze. What was that noise? Where had it come from? It took me a moment to discover a loose bolt sitting in the well of the bobbin area. I felt sick to my stomach. Why had this happened to me? It felt personal, as though I had been singled out for mechanical misfortune.

That week was a blur of international phone calls to the United States, damp handkerchiefs and a rising sense of doubt. I remember standing in the studio, looking at the machine as though it had betrayed me. I had wanted halcyon days from the start. Instead, I was staring into the small, dark cavity behind the bobbin, trying to understand what had shaken loose and how to put it right.

It did get fixed. Not with drama, but with patience, guidance and what a builder we once had described as “a good coat of looking at”. My sobbing eventually gave way to looking properly, thinking before acting and learning the system rather than fighting it.

Experience at the frame is not the absence of storms. It is the gradual understanding that storms are part of the travel. The seas will turn. The thread will snap. A bolt may loosen. And then, with time and attention, the water settles again.

Sitting at the end of my father’s bed, listening to his strong, certain voice name a bird I did not know, I felt the steadiness of him. The body may falter. The mind may still hold steady water.

I do not know how many halcyon days lie ahead for him. I hope there are many. I hope there are more words offered across a quiet room, more fragments of memory placed carefully in my hands.

I am learning to trust that calm will return, even when I cannot yet see it. Sometimes it is already there, waiting, just beyond the rain.