Badgered

The forest is an emerald, accented by blushes of pink. Trailing larches, tottering pines, glossy-leaved rhododendrons. Flowers of campion and herb Robert. Luscious rhododendron blooms now past their best. And spears of foxglove, like torches in the shade.

It shouldn’t be the summer solstice.  In this strange year in which the seasons haven’t unfolded in the way they should, it doesn’t feel like midsummer. Already, after today, the sunlight will slowly begin to contract, but I’m not yet ready for the fade into autumn and winter – winter has only just left.

It isn’t the first time I’ve spent midsummer’s eve in the woods, but this is a different forest. An opportunity to wander different paths and feel as though I’m losing myself on them. A chance for solace among the trees.

I haven’t yet discovered the places of magic: the enchanted glades and secret groves in which the spirit of the woods dwells. Perhaps this will be one of them: this avenue of oaks, buffered by pinewoods, one end of the avenue leading into wide open fields, the other to a leafy tunnel and a shimmer of light. Perhaps it will be this old ash tree, with its eccentrically holey trunk. Perhaps one of these bowed wooden bridges, perhaps the patch of foxgloves that spears the gloom or the pine garlanded by honeysuckle. There are paths upon paths here, or so it seems. Paths spongy and red with fallen pine needles. Paths of mown grass lush with clover. Paths overgrown with hogweed parasols.

The sound of the forest: the trill and whistle of bird song; the clatter of wood pigeon wings; the creak of trees; the susurration of wind through leaves. In the morning, the birds are busy and bloated with song. None of them wants to be silent – they all compete, singing over one another. In the afternoon, a veil of sleepiness descends. The blackbird still trills occasionally, the chiff chaff still calls, the tits still chitter, but in the afternoon the birds sound faint and far away. There is the laziness of sun slanting through trees, of small birds leisurely feeding. Even the wood pigeon’s coo is gone. In the afternoon, the birds allow one another to be heard.

The air is filled with the whirr of small wings: blue tits, great tits, coal tits, chaffinch, robin. A tree creeper shimmies up a pine and a long-tailed tit balances in a nearby birch. Two woodpeckers scale the thinnest of trees, woodpigeons clatter up in the gods. A blue tit is mobbed by its young. They flit from branch to branch as it collects food, then chitter and spin their wings until their mouths are full. Squirrels and rabbits graze on the grass beside a tiny mouse. And in the evenings the big birds swoop in – jays, crows and wood pigeons.

Perhaps the spirit of the woods is here, in the small glade just beyond my cabin. A gathering of pines and a young beech stand in a circle. What might be a faint path leads to the clearing, lined with bracken on one side, rhododendron on the other. The centre of the glade is carpeted in still-green pine needles and young brambles. This is the place where the sunlight streams in through the trees. Entering via a row of three birches, painting them lime, before drippling into the clearing. This is a place where you might dance sky clad on midsummer’s eve.

But perhaps the magic here isn’t a place at all. Perhaps it is a time. At dusk, when the rabbits and birds have gone and old brock appears. Half an hour before sunset, I see him come, my first badger, nosing along the path from the enchanted glade as though it gave birth to him. He is unexpectedly soft in appearance – I know that he has sharp teeth and big claws, but he has the air of a soft toy. He ambles, there is no other word for it. Picks up a piece of food and stumbles into the bushes to eat it. Soon, I’ll see the bush move and that familiar monochrome triangle of a head will appear, checking the coast is clear, then he ambles out for another piece. The same thing is repeated a dozen times. Then he scrapes in the dirt for worms, leaving untidy clods of soil. He knows I am here. Has looked up at me and sniffed. But he wants a closer look. He walks to the deck and stands on hind paws, lifting his head to sniff again through the fence. Every night, a badger appears, sometimes two. On my last night there is a family with a cub.

Away from the forest, the sunlight is harsh, without trees to shield me from the sun’s glare.  The heat is close and fierce.  It is easier here to recognise that it is summer after all, with weeks left of sunlight before the descent into winter.  I have never enjoyed the heat.  When it gets too much, I will find a shady spot and recall the enchanted shade of the woods and the creatures who visited me there.

Bursting

The cemetery is at its most luminous in late spring and autumn, the key hinges of the year.  In autumn, the cemetery hums with the colours of turning leaves.  But now, in late May, it brims with the lace of cow parsley and a tide of bluebells.  Spring has not come quietly.  It has burst, all of a sudden.  The cow parsley is so tall that the graves hide amongst it, or only peek over the blooms.  The vegetation has the untidy lushness of late summer.  The energy is playful and busy.  A robin strikes something, a snail perhaps, on the edge of a grave, crows caw and rattle, blackbirds sing.

Hawthorn is in full blossom, leafy tresses daubed in clotted cream.  Horse chestnut flowers thrust upwards like snowy Christmas trees.  Sunlight plays between the trees, pooling in clearings and shafting through the canopy.  Light pours through the windows of the chapel, so that, seen from the outside, it is a transparent arch of illumination.  Scores of tiny flies dance in the air and hoverflies hover under the trees, seemingly motionless, like tiny baubles catching the light.  Most of the abundant dandelions have finished flowering, and there are waves of clocks like grey lollipops.  So much potential, the seeds of next year already on the wing.

My creativity has followed the pattern of the spring.  Low key at first, it has now burst open.  Like the landscape, I’m enjoying a creative spurt.  My novel and stories are out for submission, dispersed like dandelion seeds,  in that sweet moment of possibility when something good might happen to them.   I have revisited the first novel I wrote, revising it to correct those niggles I have never been quite happy with.  There is another story on the go and I have joined a writer’s circle.  At times like these writing feels easy.  Words fall into place and stories present no barriers to being told.  Fallow periods and the panic of creation is forgotten.

On a rare rainy day, I see my first swallows, two of them, darting and swooping over a roof top, switch-backing from one direction to another.  I can’t see any insects but they have obviously found something to hunt.  In the dene, the burn chatters and gurgles past miniature forests of yellow flag, thistles, cow parsley and purple comfrey.  The avenue of lindens is so lush it has become a tunnel of leaves.  There are swallows here too, but only a couple.  And more flies.  A particularly delicate creature flutters up into the trees before me, slowly, on spectral lacy wings.

There is so much to see that I don’t know where to look, so much born and being born, so much potential.  And yet life is fragile too.  In the park, early one morning, I witness a vicious scrap between crows.  The two resident sentries of the park noisily mob another close to the tree where they are nesting.  They fight, beak to feather, then resort to dive-bombing the stranger, swooping so close I hear the crack of wings across its back.  But it is too late, the interloper has stolen an egg and proceeds to devour it, one small life that won’t be born.

Among so much growth, it is hard to imagine this fragility, yet there are concerns that this year there have been fewer insects, fewer migrating birds.  When the rain falls, the tiny creatures disappear; when the sun comes out, there they are again in their hundreds.  I wonder where they go when the sun hides its face.  Perhaps they are poised, just like inspiration, waiting for the conditions to burst into life.

Returning

I hadn’t meant to walk to the sundial today.  Fog hangs heavy over the reserve so I know the dial will not be giving away any of its secrets.  I walk past the misted pond, past drowned alders laden with cones and catkins.  A trio of mallards lurk among the roots as a black Labrador cuts a scythe through the water.  Drenched paths are mudded with puddles.  Deep into April and most of the trees are still bare.  A smattering of cowslips try to bloom.  I’d wanted to wait until I could watch the sun cast shadows from the sundial, but I find myself wandering towards it anyway, a dark hyphen in the mist.  Meandering up a path lined by gorse and stunted alders.  A horse has passed this way, leaving shoeprints and garish manure.  Goldfinches and great tits dart across the path.  Woodpigeons are solemn sentinels in the trees.

I reach the top of the hill without effort.  The dial is laid on the ground in iron and stone.  The gnomon towers useless in the fog, twice my height.  A single bunch of daffodils bloom at the edge of the path.  All below me is obscured, trees peep out of the mist, the pylons are hidden as though modern time has faded into the grey.  I stand near the edge and close my eyes, picking out a trill of blackbird song, the vibrato of a robin and a chorus of twittering.  When I open my eyes and turn, a large bee bumbles past.  It takes me a second to realise what it is, it seems so incongrouous here in this place made lonely by the fog.

Every time I think spring is here, another season takes its place.  April has been rain and mist, with the briefest hours of sunshine to fool us that winter is really over.  Nevertheless, there are dandelions like pinpricks in the embankment, daffodils and blackthorn have begun to blossom, lesser celandine trying to open in the grass.  The loud songs of great tit and chiff chaff grace the air and the heron has returned to the pond.  A starling visits my yard collecting dried weeds from the cracks in the wall for her nest.

It’s tempting to say this has been an unusual spring.  It has been very slow to come.  I’ve been slow to return too.  But I’ve learned through observing myself in the seasons that spring can never be predicted.  It isn’t the pretty, predictable blooming of flowers, creativity and action I would expect.  There is always something wrenching, something off about it.  It is like the moment of panic when I write a story – a moment when I know how the story will end but don’t know how I’ll get there, or how the story begins but not how it ends.  A very real stab of panic that I won’t be able to find the words to tell the tale that wants to be told.  There is always a moment when the story settles and it is written.  There is too, a moment when spring settles – or when I settle into spring – but it hasn’t happened yet.

It hasn’t been a period without creativity.  My unpublished novel The Wintering Place was longlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize.  I have a story short-listed for another competition.  I have written new stories, tales of wind and blood.  But this period of withdrawal has also been a time of seeking comfort.  Of re-reading favourite books and walking well-worn paths.

On May Day morning the grass is silvered with frost.  I return to the sundial anyway, as the rising sun is strong behind me.  But it is cold.  I’m beginning to feel as though I haven’t been warm for months.  The alders have sprung into leaf since my last visit, and the cowslips are scattered banks of yellow.  Hawthorn blossom rarely blooms here in time for its festival, but the cherry blossom is out, if a little more muted this year.  The reserve is full of birdsong including the piping call of a particularly loud great tit.

At the top of the hill, the sundial does its work, shadowing the correct hour.  Last time I was here there was no world beyond the hill; today the landscape is set out before me in a haze of sunlight.  To the east, sea and horizon; to the south the river and the huge ship waiting to carry wind turbine foundations to sea; to the west, the shadow of the Pennine hills.  Stretched out below me are all the places I have travelled as spring struggled to be born, all those well-worn paths deepened by the pad of my feet.

It might have been the moment spring settled, that morning on top of the hill.  But as Beltane fades, winter doesn’t turn to spring, but to summer.  The air thickens and the sun bakes.  And it is the dandelions that put on a show, vivid raffia splodges in the grass.  I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such an abundance of them.  Soon daisies and cherry blossom petals sprinkle the spaces in between so that the grass is a quilt of yellow and white.  I see my first butterflies and myriad tiny creatures cloud the air.  A crow calls from a nest at the top of the still-leafless poplar.  I don’t know what this season is anymore, or what I should expect it to be.  Perhaps there won’t be any settling this year after all, only a messy, jubilant return to light and life.

 

Beast

I wake just before midnight and peep through a crack in the blind to find the night-world altered by snow.  We have been expecting a ‘beast from the east’ but this is too tame, too silent to suggest that ferocity will follow.  I watch a confetti of snow flutter and twirl gently beneath the glow of the street lights.  Snow contains a world of silence within it.  I know that come morning, it will have muffled the sounds of the landscape, but for now, there is something magical about the quiet of its falling.

Snow covers but it also reveals.  Reflecting the promise of dawn, the park in the early hours is much lighter than it should be and I wonder how a sky still dark can appear light.  Snow reveals where we have been.   There are tracks in the park, tracks of a dog and her human companion.  I know who they belong to and the snow shows me that they have been here before us.  The snow reveals the visits of those we might not normally see.  Another snow-clad morning in another place, there is only one set of human footprints visible, but the rabbits have been busy and the snow allows me to follow their path.

On the beast’s first morning, the sunrise slants across the square, stretching the tree shadows and gilding the white.  Poking through the snow, crocuses are a brave yellow stream and purple puddles.  But it isn’t long before the beast reveals its teeth.  Snow reveals but it also covers.  The blizzards sweep in and obscure the landscape in a whorl of ivory.  The fog horn is humming in the distance, a ship slowly honks its horn as it moves out of the river.  Drifts of powder billow from the roof tops.  I don’t recall the last time I saw an icicle here, but scores of them drip from scaffolding in the street.

The beast doesn’t stop.  Sometimes gentle and wispy, sometimes heavy like ticker tape.  It continues until the landscape is marshmallow.  The brave crocuses are now buried, the daffodil shoots wilting.  I see a dead house spider in the snow and I wonder how it got there.  The whine of the wind is often a lonely sound but it seems even more so as it hums across the snow-covered void.  It howls and moans like a cartoon ghost, scattering the park with limbs of trees.  A platinum flash of lightning and a crack of thunder – just one.  I’m on the phone to someone 3 miles away and we both see and hear it at the same time.  According to meteorologists it is now the first day of spring, but the beast doesn’t care about that.

Snow covers.  For a while it cloaks the world in fleecy beauty.  It empties the streets and deadens harsh sounds.  The ugliest sights are given a pleasing blanket of diamonds.  It clothes the bones of trees and the mud-soaked ground.

Snow makes us children again.  My dog bounds like a puppy.  Snowmen appear on every corner.  Families appear with sledges.  A group of young people play snowballs.  This is an unusual snowfall and there is a sense of lightness, of happiness, that it has changed the world for a while.

I don’t want to let go of the snow.  I walk down to the dene on the last day that it covers the ground.  Dogwood reds and golden reeds are vivid against the pale landscape.  The ponds are frozen in milky patches and fractured reflections.  I take seed for the ducks and gulls stranded on the ice.  There is sadness in the slow melt, as the soft white becomes hard and translucent at the edges and the snow becomes grey slush.  Rain will come tonight and wash away every last trace.  I don’t want to let go and yet at the same time I long now for lighter mornings and kinder weather.  I’m glad that the beast visited but happy to bid her a fond farewell.

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Drenched

We walk out into a drenched landscape.  I can’t see the rain except in a blurring of the air.  I can’t feel it, except in a drenching of fabric and fur.  But the trees display it like sparkling finery: in crystal drops like precious fruits lobed on the end of twigs and gleaming bubbles surrounding withered rosehips.  The world isn’t silent, but it seems that way.  The song of a robin and the trumpet of moorhens shatter the air.  This kind of rain obscures the landscape, but also brings it clarity.  It draws me to reflections, fingers of rain-drenched branches reflected in rippling waters.

Winter hasn’t let go of its grip on the land.  Wild winds and hail that pricks my skin. Puddles shattered by ice.  But winter has relented today.  No more ice.  No more cold.  The air isn’t quite warm, but it’s gentle.  A crow perches on a rubbish bin, head feathers wetted into soft spikes.  It allows me to approach, then follows us, hopping along the grass.  When we pass, I feel the breath of its wings as it swoops to a tree just ahead.  This doesn’t seem like a mobbing, more a gesture of connection.

I need this gentle melancholy.  At night I’m plagued by anxious dreams associated with work.  When I wake, it’s often with a work problem in my thoughts.  I crave comfort: the comfort of familiar books, already-written stories, well-trodden paths.  I crave withdrawal.  Perhaps this is no more than the turmoil of approaching spring and when the bluebells bloom I’ll return.

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The earth, dancing

In the stillness of a half-lit house it is easy to believe that the world is at rest.   There is no movement that I can perceive.  No sound to crack the silence.  But stillness is an illusion.  My body is a commotion of movement.  I breathe in and out, my heart beats, eyes blink, cells vibrate, synapses fire.  When I am still, I am never motionless.  And neither is the house around me.  Floorboards creak and settle, radiators sigh, tiny creatures scuttle, dust motes twirl.  I barely notice it, but there is motion within and around me, a ballet that never stops.

We are no more than mayflies to the earth.  Like the blink of an eye against its billions of years.  To us, it seems slow and solid.  The ground is steadfast beneath our feet.  Immovable rock, sturdy hills, venerable trees.  We are confident of walking on solid ground.  Confident that, barring natural disaster, the routes we take will scarcely alter.  But the earth is ancient and moves at a speed we can’t always perceive.  We see the evidence of movement in the measure of days and years, yet it is hard to believe that the ground on which we walk is spinning beneath us and in a constant waltz with the sun.

We may not see it, especially in the naked midwinter, but the earth is always dancing.  Anyone who has ever watched a time lapse film of the landscape knows that it is not still.    The plants that seem static are growing as we pass, gracefully extending shoots and unfurling flowers.  Trees are pushing out buds and growing branches.  Rotting vegetation is transforming into soil, rock becoming sand.  The dance is taking place all around us, but it is a slow dance, one imperceptible to our vision.  I have never watched a flower being born or a shoot caught in the act of piercing the soil.  The shift appears to take place when we aren’t watching.

Sometimes the dance of the earth is obvious.  It is there in the rhythm of the waves and the sparkle of the stars.  It is visible in the phasing of the moon and the flicker of shadows.  It is in the glide of a wing, the prance of hooves and the tap of feet.   Weather is the earth putting on a show: the flamenco of rain, the waltz of snow.  The wind is a masterful choreographer, setting leaves jigging, grasses swaying, clouds scudding the sky.  It has many moods, many styles, from the subtle minuet of a breeze to the jitterbug of a gale.

At Candlemas, I look for the first signs of spring stirring in the earth and I see dancing.  I see it in the burbling of the burn and the ripples on the pond.  I see it in the shoots of the daffodils and the first purple crocuses rising to meet the sun.  I see it in the flicker of teal and orange that is the kingfisher I first glimpsed last March.  And in the snow that falls like ticker tape the next day.  So when February seems dismal and bare, don’t forget that the earth is dancing.  And though you may not feel like dancing – you already are.

Bones

This is the season of bones.   The season of stark silhouettes against lowering skies.  It is a season in which you can see the structure of the earth, the skeleton.  The land is open.   Views are revealed that would normally be hidden by foliage and flower.  But all is not quite as transparent as it seems.  For this is nature’s most secretive season.  Life goes on, but it goes on in the dark places: beneath clotted soil, within thickened stems and in shaded burrows.

Wherever I go, I see bones.  Ossuaries of branch and twig.  Bleached bones of silver birch.  Gnarled bones of cherries.  Alders knobbly with catkins.  Sweeping bones of ash.  And I see the bones of the flowers that were.  The spiky teasel heads, the skeletons of hemlock.  The earth is at its most prickly.  Its most unfriendly, perhaps – barbs to brush against, ice and mulched leaves to slip on, mud to trap unwary feet.  As though it is telling us to stay away, stay indoors, there is nothing out here for you.

When I look at my local landscape, I see the bones of industry.  My landscape is changing, as it does.  Usually the transformation is in small, unnoticed steps.  But I see a skyline dominated by enormous cranes and the skeleton of new apartments.  The red lights of the cranes wink in the sky at night, disconnected dots.  I see a horizon spiked with clusters of yellow skeletons, foundations for wind turbines awaiting their journeys to sea.  Steel behemoths visible in the gaps between skeletons of wood.   Bones upon bones.

Paul Nash – The Menin Road

I see bones in the paintings of Paul Nash, as I wander his exhibition in a gallery nearby.  He is famous for scenes of World War One in which the skeletons and stumps of blasted trees scar the landscape.  But there are rows of cherry tree skeletons in The Cherry Orchard; scatters of the bones of trees in We are making a new world and The Menin Road.  The bones of scrapped war planes in Totes Meer.  But Paul Nash is also known for a mystical attachment to landscape and the genius loci; for painting the earth stained by equinox and moon; and for pursuing the creative sweet spot between dreams and waking.

In this season of bones we do all we can to keep ours hidden.  Layered under coats and scarves and hats, burrowed in our houses among blankets and fires.  We turn from the bones and heed nature’s call to stay away, or if not, then we shield ourselves against her bitterness.  But nature has a plan for us too.  This is our time for moving inwards.  As the trees dream within their armoured shells and the seeds dream beneath the darkened soil, so we dream too, whether we know it or not.    We dream of what we will do, of what we will be, of what we will create.  Sometimes the dreams will come easily, laid bare like nature’s skeleton.  Sometimes, they will be secretive and struggle to be born.  This is the season of bones, but already crocuses pierce the earth like golden spearheads and buds adorn the branches.  The earth is already waking and telling us her dreams.