Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

Cold circles back with icy grey skies and thoughts of snow. We watch the sky and, intermittently, it rains. It’s the sort of weather that can be shrugged off, cold enough to warrant preparing an evening fire. In the evening we are driving to Plymouth. The windscreen is rain speckled. Beyond the glass, cloud has filled up so much of the sky it has spilt over onto the ground. In the mist, whispers of shapes. The traffic is a river of brake lights, slow flowing. Trees, older than the road, crouch. Domed industrial units menace with bulk. Things in the mist are hidden, it makes them easy to imagine transformed. This is not what everyone means by the phrase ‘living in a fairy tale,’ but my ego thinks it should be.

Mr has laid down so many hedge branches it looks like a storm has torn through, following the rut of the muddy stream. Dog is in the stream, picking up mud samples that will not exactly colour match the brown leather sofa. I throw the ball into some prone treetops and pretend Dog is flying. If you are prone to idiosyncrasy, the opportunities to make your own entertainment are increased. All along the hedges, the cut wood stumps of the hazel and the willow are pale as Ophelia floating drowned in the pond, while the alder is brassy like a vintage fake tan. 

Pheasant lies in wait at the top of the drive. He is going to chase off the car that invades his territory most mornings. I think I have driven around him, I look in my wing mirror for his fancy feathers, but somehow I must have missed his flight over into the field, or imagined the bird was there. I’m not that tired, and the frost of the morning has sparkled me into wakefulness, so I am puzzled by this. There is an empty lane reflecting in the car’s looking glass, until I turn to line up for parking. Pheasant reappears, he has run in the blind spot all the way down the track, ruffling his impressive plumage.  Pheasant remains out of sight while Dog and I walk around the fields. The frost has crept away. Sun comes down and I smell warm earth. I have my winter coat on, but undone. My hands are bare, but hidden inside the coat sleeves. There are still leaves from autumn, slowly trodden into the ground, slowly being absorbed. The earth has a slow metabolism. 

Sun, unencumbered, surges in through every curtain gap. The birds see it long before I think to open my eyes. They are calibrated to sense the first twitch in the fabric of night. Their chorus resonates. This is how the nineteenth day of February begins. I take my mug of cold yesterday’s coffee from the pot and out to sit in the garden chair in which Cat likes to sleep. Tired, thanks to Baby’s unsprung teeth, I close my eyes and raise my face to the sun, and browse along the inside of my eyelids, following warm colours from a golden peach to the deepest heart of red. This expanse of colour can only be the span of my eyelids, but from here it is the size of space. Open my eyes, frown at the stuff-pile waiting to be taken to the tip. It has its own junk appeal, this untidy slice of life. Shut my eyes, escape in the mosaics of glowing cerise. Later, when the laptop workings are reinstalled with all the reverence of surgery, and the rebooted reincarnation is marvelled at, of cours

Today is woken by a satisfying release of rain. It throws itself down all morning. In the afternoon the monocloud mutates into individuals, allowing the sun to startle people. A nipping wind reminds everyone not to discard coats. Later I roam the fields with Dog, I walk under a cloud shadow, looking out at sun patterns on the moors. I look down at drops of rain lined up on grass blades. Just drops of water, not unusual objects, but these little dots all join up, they are all part of the water cycle and the miracle that life exists at all. Just like most people, ordinary and amazing. And then I came home to write about it, and found my old lap top unresponsive. Where there should be words and familiar icons, there is a blank screen. I am able to borrow a strange machine, and struggle with the odd ways of doing things that should be automatic. Many of my words and pictures are lost in the blank screen.  I suffer a miniature grief for it. The sky settles to an off white, and t

Fine rain filters down this morning, the weather finally makes a choice. A subtle choice, as the drizzle is too light to disperse the cloud and the clouds are too thick for the sun to be seen, leaving the sky in blended greys. Yesterday a burst of escaping sun threw out an abundance of heat, I could see from winter right through spring to summer. This day’s rain comes like a relocation, back to the end of winter, to a precise place in the perpetual flux between seasons. In the afternoon more sun sneaks out, and the laughing wind chases cloud and shakes the tree branches. The trees are not yet come to leaf, though I note the tall lymes are flecked with dark rosy buds. Blue is seen in the sky, warmth sensed in the air, clouds are whipped into egg white shapes, the crocus swells into flower. Here I find equilibrium, where the description is the narrative, where I am noticing the gauge of the rain.

Yesterday’s idea of a storm has passed. Weighted clouds remain, without menace, a soft compression overhead. The rain is swelling, the air is warming, the earth is calm, meditating, not sleeping. Underfoot, the mud is firm and pliable. I am looking down at the first push of nettles when I discover a headless blackbird. The head has been snicked off at the base of the neck, quite neatly. Blackbird’s feet are curled in, as though it could still hold on to a branch. The body looks untouched, but, under a closed wing, tiny ribs are visible. From the shape of the wounds, I am guessing the crows did this. I see how the feathers are so finely layered, how light the bones, how strong those little feet have been. Maybe bird-souls turn into clouds, fly up and wrap the earth in a grey nest. A few gentle fat drops of rain fall, I hold out my palm to the sky and catch three. ‘Pheasant, wood pigeon, blackbird,’ I say, and the snowdrops nod.