Daydreaming in scented wings...
“I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one.” ― Edna St. Vincent Millay.
My dear friends, hello and welcome, consider yourselves all hugged warmly. Your presence is appreciated as hugely as all the blossoming fruit trees in my orchard.
I hope you are all feeling a little of the joys spring holds in its becoming. We aren’t quite there yet, I know, I know… just feeling its tantalising proximity! The light is slipping into lengthening days, colour is painting hedgerows and meadows, the frenzied, fresh furore of knowing all that lives and breathes is in the throes of cyclic reproduction, everything journeying with a destination in mind, breathing, sighing, singing… an orchestral manoeuvre choreographed with a precision perfected over the millennia.
I daydreamed this week. Forced by the necessity of work related meetings I wrote words far from any context of my longings during long hours, all filled with filings and findings fraught with disagreements. I tried to concentrate, I really did. But, someone who didn’t know any better, sat me by a window looking out on billowing clouds, birds courting, pigeons circling a church spire, sticky buds on branches beginning to burst into fluorescent greens, a beautiful black cat hiding amongst the shadows of citrus petaled daffodils in a neighbouring garden, too many distractions and diversions begging for the attention of this flighty Gemini girl.
Regardless, the week has been fraught and hectic, I have had few minutes to myself on a hill that is calling for so many more… every one taken in a hurried trot, but all were particularly glorious, if brief sighs…
On a typical March day, when all the seasons have cleverly crammed themselves into one, all striving to outdo whatever squabble of rights came before. On a day when I’m feeling high from sudden fresh-air-intake into tight lungs, euphoric in the sounds of nature after hours spent in small rooms with beautiful small people asking unending questions. On a day when gallant gusts of March winds, having won for a wild wink of time, are blowing me forward from behind—until they change their mind and they are no longer—carrying with them pungent white whorls of confetti wings from every blossoming branch of plum, I trot, with a relieved Wolfie in tow, into gathering dusk.
I don’t expect miracles, one needs time for revelations such as these, they don’t occur when minutes are short—or hurried by canine needs—no, certainly not, either, in this wind with movement distorting trunk and branch, sky-shape and cloud colour. I simply want to feel the sigh of a day delivering nightfall, the tremble of the land just before obscurity tricks the eye, rifles with belief before summoning the dark demons of a playful imagination.
I don’t expect diversions, I have passed this tired old barn, with red tiled roof over crooked, ivied gables on many a similar dusky evening. I know already the spidery, pendulous cobwebs within, the giant oak cart-wheels abandoned by oxen whose bones are long turned to dust. Today I don’t even plan to hop over the gate, wave a kind handed hello to the souls of the ghosts echoing in its bowed chestnut rafters, or, even, wait for the family of slumbering bats to stretch open delicate wings at this time of their silent yet sonorant waking. I simply gaze through the spikes of blackthorn hedge, daydream a while of owning this building so grounded in the lay of its land and the chatter of its ghosts, so precisely positioned in the valley landscape most would pass by without even a turn of the head.
It is a beautiful dream. In vain, I know this, but it is infinitely calming and harmless.
I am watching the three old oaks. The great, great grandmothers of all others on the hill. They stand graceful, still, despite—or perhaps, even more so because of—their age. I circle the short walk daily, just to wish them good-day, to stand beneath their ancient sturdy boughs, check the sign has not been sent so as not to miss the opening harmonic chords of leaf bursts as I have so many years before. Their branches are heavy with waiting, they have wisdom in their years, they are close to sending word out into the winds, in the scent of things, but they are sentient, patient . I hear their whisperings, the eldest to the youngest, admonishing, insistent and no, some, so much like adolescent earthlings, don’t listen. They are in a hurry, their instruments are not in tune and their finger tips are burnt. They’ll learn…
Briefly - as has been the way this week.
In a torrent of petaled wings flying in the still faintly, musky scent of winters last futile holding of the land, in another fast trot up the lane in the few minutes at my liberty to do so, I notice the irrevocable signs—tugging at hope, releasing deep sighs held in too long—the cold season dying. It has left its scars across the landscape, there are holes in the forest shadows once filled. Casualties of climate contrariness… the combat of our time.
During the first week of knowing this home, as I left my first footsteps forever etched on this hill called Le Paradis, twenty walnut trees were planted, one now lays across the graves of other, four and two legged loves we have lost in the years since. In Mondays gusts of howling winds, bowing one last time to elements its roots could not withstand, it silently gave up its place in this life, ready to give to the next. It seems somehow fitting, in its demise, that it should have fallen where those other loves are lain, to join their beautiful ruins.
When I look at my hands they remind me of my mothers hands, they are no longer elegant but they touch with love. I will never stop missing hers.
I am grateful that the weather is typical, I can believe, albeit momentarily, that there is, still, despite the horror, such a feeling as normal. I am grateful that I can wander amongst the sanctuary of birch trees and still catch their scent after rain, that sunlight still glints on silvery bark, that they dance like goddesses of light in the wind. That I can recall the words of Robert Frost.
Forever in awe of silver birch light and petals and that beautiful day dream, with love
Some loveliness caught in a every busy week: I am days behind schedule in reading this week. With that in mind here is a list of amazing writers who take the time to record a narration of their beautiful posts for those of us that don’t have the liberty to sit quietly and read.
In no order of preference because you are all so talented and such treasured gifts.
- Ben I missed the link for your live recording due unexpected guests, I am gutted!For making all the mundane chores I work my way through after my paying job lighter more bearable!
Thank you so much!
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So many distractions Susie, I know so well. I must take extra precautions when working from home else the long tailed tits hanging upside down from the silver birch branches and the blackbirds proudly singing on the fence would have me staring out of the window all day. In the office, I fare better, my desk looks out onto the second floor of a courtyard and I can see nothing more than windows and the sky and cladded building. I did one watch a butterfly flit gracefully in and out of the netting stretched over the top that keeps the birds out. It made my day. It has been a cold but beautifully bright weekend here, and I am remembering my blessings so that the thoughts of a week ahead of work do not loom too heavily. sending love xx
I’ve started saving these for Monday mornings, Susie … a coffee, a warmed up pastry, and beautiful words that transport the reader to parts unknown … a nudge to this Gemini to notice more of the unfurling of Spring (not just the mole that is slowly working his way across what I laughingly call our ‘lawn’). Like you, we were beset by icy blasts … actual snow yesterday, and the layers are all back on for the cycling. Thank you for allowing us a glimpse between the trees through your eyes; such sparkling attention to details … makes me think of Mary Oliver - pay attention, be astonished.