Thursday 8th December 2016 21:30
I had an amazing day yesterday…
It was Wednesday, 7th December 2017. It started after a night of stormy winds and heavy rain. From my apartment balcony I could see the coastline. It was clearing, so I decided that I would take my 2-year-old to the beach. I invited my Mum and after a 5 minute drive, by 10am we were beneath a beaming sun on the damp sands of Coral Bay beach.
This all sounds beautiful enough as it is, but there was also a huge sense of ‘freedom’ in the air.
Let me take it back a bit…
I am daughter to a nature-loving Dad and a very creative Mum… a combination which I must say I am very proud to have inherited. So naturally, I grew up with a passion for all things outdoorsy, wild but also from the comfort of a very ‘arts & crafts’ home, as well as a good-time spent in my mother’s craft & embroidery shop in the beautiful county of Sussex, England.
In my late teens, my parents emigrated to retire in Cyprus, a beautiful island in the Mediterranean Sea. Initially I stayed in England, intending to secure a future there, however I had a bit of a realisation one day at my job at a security company. In a nutshell, money overruled the security of the public. As I walked home from work that day, I looked around me. Emotionless faces hurriedly getting from A to B. The same posh cars parked in the same reserved spots at the office building. Somehow I’d got lost; not literally, but I had a deep, plummeting feeling of ‘I don’t belong here’.
I sent this message to my Mum:
“What do I need to do in order to live in Cyprus?”
Within a few months, I was calling Cyprus my home.
That was 11 years ago.
Although my Mum hadn’t intended to work after relocating, it only seemed natural for her to reopen a shop. That shop grew from a tiny unit filled with cross-stitch kits, silks and petite glass beads, to a large double-unit with haberdashery, sewing equipment, but mostly dedicated to knitting and crochet yarn and notions. It got so busy, I was lucky enough to work there with Mum and some other lovely ladies. It was there I learned to crochet. We ran clubs, workshops and helped whoever we could, if we had a spare moment between serving people at the till. Really busy…
It sounds like I’m approaching the peak of the story doesn’t it? But the truth of it is, we had become so engrossed in supplying the demand, focusing on ‘business’, that we had lost sight of the real reason for opening the shop in the first place. As we started to become aware of this, it seemed to point towards Mum turning over a new leaf and retiring… and I had a choice to make…
*stay tuned*
Lorraine xXx
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