Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

Sunshine and cloud that piles up, up, up in spite of the pushy breeze: treetops bobbing, washing flailing on the line. It is warm behind glass. Croscomias poke up leaves of flaming green, the daffodils are in full voice, celandines and primroses proliferate. Here and there a tulip ventures, and hyacinths trail heavy scent. Blackthorn blossoms, hawthorn comes to leaf. Whether the cold comes back, as it does some years, echoing winter, the earth is awake, daylight hours are stretching and ready for the buzz of pollinators, for the nesting of birds, the bloom and boom of spring.

Daylight is grey light, filtered through yet another damp sky.  I had to drive Mr's car to work due to the back box of the exhaust pipe falling off my car.  It is fixable and no accident occurred so the worst of this could have been the broken radio robbing me of music for my commute, but the wind kindly blew haunting whistles through the roof rack all the way.  Roadside daffodils swayed and bent- they could have been laughing or crying, depending on who was looking.  They wouldn't care.  Neither weather nor mood can change them, they are always daffodils, harbingers of spring.  I am applauding and they are taking a bow.

Mizzle is the Cornish name for the fine, fine precipitation that craftily sinks through your clothes and gets your skin wet even though it does not appear to be raining. Today the weather is mizzling, milder, softer, stealthy. Spring is whispering closer, though I drove to work down some old lanes that took me back in time; hundreds of years of hedges and fields, of seasons turning; here no flowers had yet even come to bud- it was poised in winter- it was like being shown someone else’s memory, like history was layered- like the mist. You could reach out a hand, feel it soak into your bones. It was peaceful. A reprieve. So when I reached the next village and the verges sang with flowers, I sang out with them- the song of seasonal lineage, the song of Winter-Spring. 

It hasn’t rained every minute of the day, only most of them. At lunch, I walked back from the shops again (went to try on leopard print shoes but they pinched, came back with a lamp that didn’t work, returned it; bought two candles instead, and a consolation avocado) with my grey striped hair loosely tousled,  in my black faux fur, looking like some kind of damp forest beast.   Before the rain I listened to birds sing, trill, caw and call- the sound of gulls involuntarily invoking winter sea dips- I could feel the waves swoosh at my calves, the soft salinity, the foam-fuzz.  In the rain, I listened.  The percussion of it, the white noise of it, the way it wraps you in your space.  I was a soggy happy beast hugging an avocado, dreaming of swimming and candlelight.  Later I will drive home, it will be dark. Whatever the weather, the car’s headlights will scan over green verges and the spring flowers will glow. Everytime they elicit awe- real, edge-of-the-phys...

In-between the mixes of rain we managed a little work on our land. Mr cut staves from the Middle Hedge to mark out and support another length of dead hedging along the westerly side of the tree corral. I wrestled cardboard and clinging weeds to put a first mulch layer around each tree in the Durnford Hedge, to give them the advantage when spring sets off her starting pistol. In the Dragon Hedge we attempted and failed to save the storm-stomped rose arch (the rose itself is unharmed) and pruned back a few stems of rugosa. Behind a clump of primrose, which offered up two flowers, a pheasant skull was loitering. In the Middle Hedge snowdrops had appeared, and fancy frilly ones at that. Things are budding, growing, creeping up, including the names we arbitrarily applied to areas. The Middle Hedge is named for its location, the Durnford Hedge for the grower of the seven oaks that started it, the Dragon Hedge for the spikes of the rugosas and raspberries. The old paddock land is being claime...

This morning, Wednesday 4th February: at 6am the alarm woke me from patchy sleep. This isn’t terribly early but Tuesday nights are always late so I knew I would be tired. Everything was prepped, including the coffee. All I had to do was boil water and pour it; wait a little, plunge the pot, then take my mug of dark, wonderful sorcery back to bed and bridge the gap between reluctance and acceptance.  By 7am I was driving, admiring even the sloshy weak light- I saw two magpies, auspicious, then two-thirds of the waning moon loitering over astronomic clouds. Making good time I took the sea road where the view rolled out and out over slate grey, white topped waves- and yes, I am tired but I am thinking about the good stuff: a quiet brew, coastal scenery, tokens of luck.

Today was a pop of spring in between rain warnings- the ground and air damp, the sky blue and white, the sun imbuing warmth- like a rainbow, it held promise. I walked awhile and noted where branches had snapped, where floods had swept stones and mud across roads, where spring bulbs and stems ne’ertheless pushed up through winter’s mulch.

The sky is all shade, no colour. It looks flat unless I stare, then I see evidence, no more than smudges: here was a cloud, gone now, rained out. The sky is ghosts. But the horizon is alive with stark beauty: winter trees, the silhouette of a lone crow. 

This morning we managed to finish the latest line of deadhedging on our land, the one that will catch the icy flow of air as it sneaks down into our tree corral, that will be excellent cover for the frogs we hope will soon find our first mini pond. At home snowdrops drift up banks- ants carry their seeds, they are gardeners too. Daffodil hordes begin to raise their colours, heralded by bold crocus. Evenings are light for longer, bit by bit, and though the weather wearies of surprising us, doubling back to storms, we are heartened, we are sturdy in the whirl and lash of winter’s middle month.

Homewards, I drive. Fog makes heavy work of driving, makes you concentrate to find the road. It gathers like a paste in the valleys, dissipates on peaks. As I guide my car up onto Bodmin Moor the view expands beyond the expected. A bridge of startling light all across the night sky, a bridge between worlds! The Aurora Borealis has me questioning my sanity until I'm home and everyone else can see it too. Even monochromatic it swells with magic: through a camera lens all the colours that a human eye can't catch are there.  We pull on boots and warm coats and walk into the middle of a field to see the whole sky open- and then clouds close the show, and cold pinches our skin. But we are satiated, happy to return to the cosy hearth, hearts full of wonder. 

It’s a misty commute. In several spots visibility dims to fog levels (less than 1000 metres if you are curious about the definition of fog) but there’s morning sun so it’s a bright obstruction. In fact here and there the air clears and sunlight is the cause of extreme squinting.  Last night’s journey was hazy like some weirdness was erasing the landscape- perhaps I would arrive home to find nothing there? I was intrigued. In the obscured I feel wrapped up rather than separated. I am in my hermit era. I am a soul happily cackling in the mist, on my own path.  But!  Every now and then I connect with outside life and a question sneaks out- What does lie ahead, beyond the fug of modern uncertainty?  And the answers bounce back like this:  the only place we can influence the future from (or the past) is the present: the best place to begin is here; the best time is now.  Small stuff adds up.  What seems set in stone forever is swept away by weather; certain...

Mr and me sit on our two piece sofa, one either side and each with a damp dog huddled beside. It has been healthy chaos here. Muddy prints spiral from the front door, soggy chew-toys are draped over carpet and tile.  Mr has been bundled up, fighting off a cold with rest and home remedies, while I have pottered through a rare day off: hid upstairs and remade a lightshade, boxed away some Xmas clothes, daydreamed. Downstairs, remade the fire, served up leftovers for lunch, walked the happy houseguests.  Mr drops into sleep, rumbling snores. The dogs begin their dream twitches.  If the clock worked I'd be listening to its tick. It does not work so we have set it at midnight to summon moon magic. So, in a way, the clock is functioning perfectly. 

Daylight feels cold, the ground is frost crusted. Underground, into this chill murk, spring bulbs are stirring. All the seasons have their transformations of course, but this the time when people also look ahead and make plans and hope for change. Which is why I am also reflecting on the opposite, on why some people put effort into avoiding, why they prefer to fester... and these are my notes- Because if you try, you might fail. Because the work to change is difficult, it makes you tired, and you might fail. Failure is the loss of what you could have been, over and over. And there are some who would rather be a liar than a failure. If you are not humble, and do not see a small life as a beautiful achievement, if you would rather pretend that this not-trying is a grand adventure, a thing beyond the ordinary, this is avoidance. If a plain life seems beneath your ambitions, you don't feel the need to try: this is avoidance. But you will be stuck and afraid and angry that we see you, t...

First we had the coffee, then we did the thing. An orderly beginning, especially as the thing was a list.  A list is one of my favourite structures. It should be (ours is, hurrah) simple, fluid, evolving. Ticking off items is dopamine rich. And if at the year’s end there are tasks leftover you can burn that nonsense and start again. Failure is only failure if you refuse to start again, again, again. (Yet some folks fear it so much they can't even begin.)  We aren't thinking ‘New Year New Me’ we are more taking stock of where we are, checking our route to where we'd like to be, taking note of seasonal chores. Lucky us, already on a journey. Doesn't mean we will never feel lost. But if we do, okay, maybe first we mewl and curse, but then we brew the coffee. 

On social media, if you have picked a flower, you can display it in a vase , take a picture, you can angle the stem to hide the slug bites, you can artfully light them. You curate, you edit. The flower is of course something from your life - happy or sad, it is proffered up to be examined, appreciated, related to, shared. But every flowerbed requires fallow time to thrive. Real life shrivels from the overshare, virtual life becomes a facade, a lie. I have been fallow awhile online, beautifully busy offline, with small complaints like a leaky roof , like sometimes the weather wasn't right. I always have bruises (either from training or tree related) but didn't get ill once. I was not hungry. Our plans for the land are taking tangible shape, I am working on three novels, I am making pretty things out of broken stuff, I am enjoying the work and the rests in between. Next year the idea is to record and share more of the Paddock Garden Orchards adventures- I will be curating, I ...

19th November, a Wednesday. On the very next hill it is cloud-dark and raining; our cheeks and fingers are bright, pinched by the wind, our eyes are squinting through sunlight. A layer of leaf mulch begins to gather over the track, and under the heap of cut branches taken from the overgrown boundary. The old hedge is being laid in: it will grow up to make a living fence. What is discarded is of use as firewood, or whittling projects, or the construction of semi-tidy deadhedges. Today we are building the sixth of these- we are not sure how many we will have by the end of the hedging season but in the top field the plan is to cover the upper swell of the hill. This will make mini microclimates, shelterbelts for shrubs that will grow and make more shelter, and for our (hopefully) showboating canopy trees. They will make shelter for wildlife, (wrens and robins jump through the branches before they are even finished) they will add options to games of hide-and-seek: they will be ...

My Chromebook has been crumbling. It seems a little like dementia, this inability to upgrade its powers of communication, it makes me sad, even for an object. It's one of the reasons my posts here have been put aside, that and generally being tumbled by tiredness. I have saved up money for a replacement, also I have spent that money on trees and shrubs. I have two novels to sort out however, and this will be the reason I save up again. I don't stop writing, even if I don't tell anyone. In the meantime should you need a calm place to go, I have begun a substack account. Please do drop by. If the kettle crumbles we can make tea (or soup) on the firepit. Me on substack:  Lisa Southard