a handful of February

Bonjour, from Mistle thrush and Robin—briefly the stars and everything in readiness to burst...

Hello lovely ones! Welcome, welcome one and all. Consider yourselves all hugged tightly!

As I write, there is not a glow of moonlight in the slate black void above me, yet the wind is howling like a pack of wolves, rain is stampeding across the roof tiles, leaping off the edges forming new gushing rivers as the deluge collects below on the ground. The pond, usually just a muddy puddle, has overflowed down the track to the sheep field so much so that when I call my four woollen loves they tiptoe around the edge like dainty wool clad ballerinas because, what in Ireland would be called a turlough, has formed in the middle. They are not amused. Me neither…

all this after I wrote such a kind love letter to winter…

Regardless that February has settled in in a manner scarily reminiscent of the Emerald Isle—why did we move to SW France? do, please, remind me… the first half of the month is flying, the pace feels insane after the slowness of January but there you go. Much as I rant about lack of time, I am neither disappointed nor even particularly sad. Given the volume of water fallen over past days I am craving light and colour and dry and maybe the chance to wear something looking a little less like it would make Patsy and Edina grab the nearest bottle of Chablis to numb the pain of such an eyesore, heaven forbid they should read the label!

I am no fashionista but mud caked? daily? urgh… je n’en peux plus!

If January felt like a wound, February is the scar.

My ankle is dragging its heels in the healing process. however, it IS healing; I can almost walk without limping! To all of you who sent kind messages, thank you so very much, you know already I adore you, consider yourselves doubly hugged.

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“As I envisage it, landscape projects into us not like a jetty or peninsula, finite and bounded in its volume and reach, but instead as a kind of sunlight, flickeringly unmappable in its plays yet often quickening and illuminating.” From ‘The Old Ways’ by Robert MacFarlane

I ask a lot of my body, I know I do. I don’t always listen when she grumbles, neither do I stop when she tells me ‘I’m tired’. I should but forever is only a certain number of days in our short human lives on this glorious planet. Isn’t that reason enough to use each precious minute with abandon? To make discoveries, have adventures, to learn and understand, to play endlessly on loved landscapes/hills/forests/oceans, pledge from the heart to keep each of them the way they are happiest. To make beautiful friends and be a friend, to create, to laugh and cry, to sing, to dance—even when dancing is not prescribed—to be kind, curious, ‘to be astonished and tell about it’. To love! Aren’t these all divine reasons to ignore the aches and the pains? I believe they are. I believe if I allow my body to speak too loudly my mind would very quickly misinterpret the information as surrender, and, in capitulating, I would become a slave to its persistent grumblings. I would miss this one, brief and beautiful life I am gifted. I would miss winter becoming spring, so much more than that.

BRIEFLY — sort of — just in the month’s beginning I would have missed:

• clouds hastening across the hill the colour of pewter accompanied by a fierce, east wind howling its frigid song in time with my feet as I walk. The bitterly cold, ice-needles-stinging-my-face-numbing-my-cheeks cold. Tumbling tarnished shades of grey clouds tangoing with sunlight in intervals of shadow light; this is strategic, an orchestral manoeuvre and I never want to miss the concert. Rain joining in; the percussion. No matter that I am a mile from home with only a beloved old hand knit for warmth, too quickly sodden minus its lanolin—sheep wisdom forgotten—I care not. I am a reverent spectator of each crescendo, the climax… then the drifting sigh, awash in the fading, of a gentle finale. Only the persistent tapping of drips touch the silence as the musicians leave.

• chasing hare—too many weeks have passed since I last saw a hare on the hill, either above hiding between silver birch and pine, bathing in a silvery pool of winter sun in rain damp grass or even below, long legs lolloping across greening meadows in the valley. A fact too alarming to dwell on, too unsettling to do nothing. I tell Wolfie, he agrees—of course he does—wagging his shaggy tail. He and I set off on a hare hunt, return three hours later, glowing from foggy damp air, limping but with a smile; two is as big as a whole new soft long-eared family.

  “we do not achieve all upon which we have set our hearts, or are beaten back by headwinds stronger than our desires, we too can lay up a while, watch the glitter on the grass, and renew our strength.”
  ― Chloe Dalton, from Raising Hare: A Memoir

• bird conversations on the first day of a new month; a robin, perched on a bare lilac branch—buds just beginning to swell—the other, a Mistle thrush, brazen in branches of dark green needles in a Noble Fir. Their conversation loud, forceful in its message, their language indecipherable, though I am certain, not for the first time, the notes they are singing are universal songs of hope.

  There are new symphonies playing in all the hedges and trees much earlier in the morning than two weeks ago. They sound like hope and Spring. 09/02/24

  

  listening to hope on a copper horizon…

• wandering the ridge of the hill at dusk; when the quiet of night is not quite a deep silence. That is to say, small birds are still chirruping but sleepily, bats are emerging in their flitterings and flutterings, flying so close I feel the brief coolness of their wings lift my hair. Then, the whooshing breeze of barn owl wings, their silhouettes gliding in between the light and dark of tree trunks, the sharp bark of a stag in warning to others and the ghostly mysterious winter moths that flicker like old cine-film from every dark place I disturb, surely they are holy winter angels?

• Walking with Seth; a conversational thing mostly, never mind that he has to wait often for me in my limping state to catch up with his leaping gazelle strides he just talks louder until I have. We pass cattle up to their knees in mud, the reek of wet silage stinging our nostrils, stop at an old oak which once shed a branch missing my darling daughter by a mouses whisker. I look up into what’s left of its diminished glory, forgive its flagging soul.

  ‘This old soldier has numbered days’ I tell Seth. He looks at me oddly, gives it a push. It doesn’t budge, ‘it’s fine mama, look’ but I shake my head. ‘No darling, it isn’t, look where the stag beetles have been, look at the conks climbing up from the base’. He gives me his oh well look.

  As we walk away I whisper up into its branches, ‘it’s time my friend, you have earned the peace that will follow, let your roots free’. Another look is thrown at me; I think it spelt crazy lady!

  Seth chatters on—incessantly, subjects I know nothing about float in and out of my concentration—though I am learning—and I, eventually, tell him some of the secrets hidden on the hill—he is learning—but I am distracted by that old oak and with reason. Perhaps Seth has hidden strength, or my whispers were heard deep into its roots?

  Now I will never know.

  The following morning, thirteen short hours later, silently, in the darkness of night, it fell.

“it was the kind of moon that I would want to send back to my ancestors and gift to my descendants so they know that I too, have been bruised...by beauty.”― Sanober Khan,

• on a miraculously clear evening, dashing outside to watch the snow moon rising behind clouds, moonbeams dancing on the barn roof, stars after so much dark—how could I miss watching constellations of stars—I discover the name of just one of the trillions and trillions I don’t recognise but have spent hours trying to.

  There are an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in the universe so distant the exact number of stars cannot be known. By counting the stars in earths own Milky Way, a guess of approximately 200 billion stars are out there twinkling—that is a huge number! Amongst these, amazingly, I finally locate the bright, red giant star Arcturus, with a diameter 25 times greater than our Sun it has an obvious copper colour. Follow the ‘handle’ of The Plough in the constellation Ursa Major, continue the line downwards, you will find yourself gazing straight at Arcturus shining at the bottom point of the kite-shaped constellation of Boötes—also known as the herdsman.

• something I learnt from Seth on another walk talking about stars; apparently there are more ways to shuffle a pack of fifty-two cards than there are grains of sand on the entire surface of the planet including the deepest parts of all the oceans… this is written as ‘52!’, meaning 52 factorial, calculated as 52x51x50x49 etc…) maybe y’all knew that already, but did you know that number has over forty more digits than the number of stars in the whole known universe?

“There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.” Richard Powers

All this, and, the soft insistent ache of knowing every living creature is beginning to think about re-creation, buds on branches blushing before bursting, animals marking then mating, everything, everything! trembling with lust for renaissance, rejoicing in anticipation of colour, life itself; trees and flora and fauna becoming, living, breathing, beautiful monuments of spring.

I will not be left standing in the stalls because of a whinging body!

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Still limping, still counting stars, with forever love for this astonishing life…

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