Of small creatures under the sun.
Badger and bird, hedgehog and human.
Dear readers, writers and curious passers-by, as always you are welcomed with a smile.
How are you? Are you enjoying the end days of autumn? It feels a little absent here, September staggered, slipped in the puddles and never recovered, October ushered in a glorious warmth, pretended to be September to compensate and now, it is mid-November and a bitterly cold, beastly wind is biting the noses and toes of everything capable of shivering. It feels like winter.
And, I don’t remember the last day I had time alone in my home, time to think quietly without an urgent need—read escaped sheep, a glut of persimmon ready to store, mowing, meetings, more meetings, lost keys, a broken fridge, a four hour fruitless search for a tumble dryer for a certain, albeit very dear, old gentleman aged 90, log deliveries, a desperate, sad student with no one close listening—interrupting flow.
So words arrive here on this page, a little breathless, numb with unaccustomed cold air but Carpe Diem… or YOLO1 to be more hip, it isn’t the right moment, its just the only one that isn’t taken.
Bird.
Under a morning sky criss-crossed with human-made cirrus clouds, above the sound of a murder of crows cawing in fields just sown with winter barley—only a day after being shaved of maize two meters high—above the sound of two blue-jay squabbling in the now skeletal branches of a walnut tree behind the barn, above the sound of blue-tits and great-tits boisterously chattering on the broken crucifix embedded on a stone plinth2 opposite the kitchen window, a robin sings, perched, while preening fluffed up feathers, on the railings to the veranda or high above in the tilieul. He is there every morning and evening. I believe, from either vantage point he can see the kitchen door, I believe he has learned of my early sortie to let out the hens by heart. I believe he follows me, hopping from tilieul branch to mulberry to walnut to pear, where he waits for grain to be given. I believe, when he edges close and closer to my outstretched hand each day, he is beginning to trust me.
I believe I am beginning to understand his songs, his tiny voice.
“I would like to paint the way a bird sings.”
― Claude Monet
Human.
An overwhelming sadness is threatening to spill into the places of my day that are sacred to joy. So very many people appear unhappy. Misery and sadness, worry and anxiety in almost all of its facial forms is evident even in the young. I want to hold each of them, show their hearts all there is in the world to smile about; the hole in a tiny leaf where the sun is shining through, the oxeye daisy still in flower in a frost in November, how the dew falling from a climbing rose formed the initials S03 on the road this morning and how sunlight filters through the old yew at a certain time of day in autumn. How despite their hardships, the world is still a beautiful place. Even if it is hiding in the debris of their hopes and dreams.
Hedgehog.
I read something I didn’t know in Grace Alexanders Sunday newsletter this week; hedgehogs frown!
…Hugh Warwick. He is, rather wonderfully, the spokesperson for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society (a society I very much want to join) and he shared why bonfires are such a disaster for the hedgehog. Most animals go into fight or flight under threat, with a drive to escape. Hedgehogs frown. The same muscle that we have that frowns, extends from above their nose down their tail, and when they frown, it isn't just their forehead that moves; their whole body contracts into a ball.
I am mortified, move all the piled up peach branches—too green to burn—from the bonfire until there is nothing left but ashes hoping I won’t find tiny hedgehog bones scattered amongst them, that it isn’t already a mass grave of hedgehog families.
It isn’t, but I don’t search too deeply.
Badger.
On a morning when the château is silhouetted against luminous light the exact colour of my ripening persimmon and leaves still clinging to increasingly bare branches are being rustled so gently by the breeze I am certain it must feel like a soothing massage. When every hidden bird is singing in a chorus so joyous in its harmonic unison they compliment the sky simply by their latent presence and every blade of grass glistens with earth stars fallen from the night, I cannot help but cry out in horror as a motionless black and white form lying on the side of the lane reveals itself, slowly, step by painful step because I know, though I don’t want to believe; a badger with a bloody bullet hole to its head.
It is not the first this year.
Skulduggery on the hill; snares have been placed over the entrances to one of the three badger setts. They are meticulously set, tiny forked twigs gently holding the murderous slip wire open, the other end of which is tied to a log ten times the size of even the biggest brock. Zero chance of escape - the work of only one person… a furious flurry of very unladylike expletives follow - possibly loud enough to echo around the valley though I fervently hope not because I unset the snares on two separate evenings. I don’t risk a third despite the temptation.
He knows I know and I know he knows I know - checkmate - this does not sit well, my mood is dismal but not resigned.
Skulduggery is not exclusive.
Must it be added to my mornings?
I move a limp body, bloody, still warm, as gently as I am able, to a strip of woodland between the field where badgers roam, where she—there was no doubt as to gender—was returning by the road she never crossed, lay her in the soft leaves under a hawthorn tree for protection, wail into the silence of morning and plan skulduggery.
I think I would like to write words like leaves do as they fall, with undone colour and abandonment, landing haphazardly in love poetry across fields and streams, flowing, fluttering, floating into forever.
“There is freedom waiting for you,
On the breezes of the sky,
And you ask "What if I fall?"
Oh but my darling,
What if you fly?” ― Erin Hanson
With love in myriad colour
Susie X
Something(s) I have loved during the madness of the week…
I read the first sentence and knew I couldn’t stop….
Along the ridge and high upon the brow, where tarns announce their skyward dance and ashek hunt unseen, I have spent my days watching the sea.
Skrimshander, a short story by Nathan Slake - magical, mystical, brilliant writing.
I think I may fall in love with every word rebecca hooper writes;
"Beauty, if we let it, slips through our hands, our minds, our cells; it is remembered in its absence, not its presence. Pain is tangible; beauty is a ghost."
A beautiful and intelligent essay - ‘Neuronal pessimism is a survival mechanism’.
YOLO - You Only Live Once - my son told me!
These crosses scatter the hamlets and roadsides, even the side of hills all over SW France, I am told they were meant as pilgrim posts but when I research further, the oldest were more likely to have been graves. Mostly they are all now forgotten and abandoned.
The initials of my sons first name are SO.
There's a special circle of hell for people who kill badgers.
I am haunted by that image of you carrying the badger in your arms. Yet the love of this very act is stronger than grief or anger. 💛