Dear March, come in is the title of a poem by Emily Dickinson.1
Thirty seconds of birdsong, Tuesday 1 March, 2022.
Here I am this fine morning, in the village churchyard, listening to birdsong and needing to talk to Esther about where I’m going with her story. I tell Esther about an attempted horse theft at a horse fair. It’s the year after John died, I say. I want to assure you that Patrick McLevaney had nothing to do with this carry on, Esther. But he’ll love telling you all about it, you know how he loves making you laugh.
I know Esther well enough, by now, to know she has picked up on a blink of chariness in my voice. She’ll want to unpick it and get on with her day. So what is the problem, then? she says.
I’d like you to go with Patrick McLevaney to the horse fair. It’s not like you’d have to stay anywhere overnight.
Esther raises her eyebrows, turns away, busying herself with something or other. Oh, but I know she’s smiling. Folk’ll yatter, she says. They already are.
That afternoon
… I walk the beck that babbles through a steep sided woodland ravine with my friend Moray Cameron. Smooth stones clack against each other as my wellingtons disturb the water bed. We can hear a rush of water falling ahead, and again. Every time, the waterfall we expect to see around the bend is but a shallow gradient. Layers of sound, the rapid drum burst of a Great Spotted Woodpecker, Moray’s soft Edinburgh accent, corvids and songbirds.
Here’s a large red fox, and here’s a slimy Alder fallen across the beck, preventing the fox’s journey downstream. The crouching fox, his head and shoulders twisted to the side. I can see his black-backed ears but his face is underwater, as if he’s looking for something. The tip of his brush is underwater, too, swaying like feathery seaweed. It’s instinctive, isn’t it, to want to settle a curiosity? I wonder how the fox died. I want to lift him from his watery grave, and then what? Bury him in the stony, root-rutted ground, or stack stones over his body? I read, somewhere, a study of foxes burying foxes.
On the way back to the cottage, we see a mossed-up sheep’s skull with bright white teeth, a cow’s jawbone turned brown on the edge of a field, and then another. We crouch to examine scarlet elfcups and I nearly walk into yellow brain fungus, neon orange, on an overhanging branch. Sherds of pottery from the beck jingle in my pocket.
You smell wonderful!
I’m sorry you couldn’t come with me, Alfie.
Hmm.
Way too dangerous for you in the water.
Well, there is that, I suppose. Hey! can we go for a walk now? Our usual place?
Tuesday 8 March. My mother’s birthday, International Women’s Day 2022 #BreakTheBias and the arrival of Clover’s new book The Red of My Blood.
Wednesday 9 March. Friend Lottie treated us to dinner and an overnight stay at Inn on the Lake.
Saturday 19 March. One minute loving the plum blossom, listening to the birds and Mr B’s Skid Steer on the farm (the farm that’s going to become a housing development.) My son gifted me this plum tree several years ago, on Mother’s Day.
Monday 21 March. M and I are walking around a small parcel of land with a three-sixty view. There are the Vales of Eamont and Eden, that’s Penrith in the distance, and look, the North Pennine fells, we can see Cross Fell.
We’re here to meet a couple who’ve recently moved to the Lake District. Can we work with them to transform the field we’re standing in - their garden - into a wildflower meadow? They’d also like two raised beds for vegetables near their kitchen, and a small paved area for a table and chairs in the meadow.
The meadow-to-be would’ve likely been a meadow, back in the day, as it’s bounded by stone walls and there’s a gate in the corner. “Farmland,” writes John Lewis-Stempel in his book Woodston, the Biography of an English Farm “can be interrogated by anyone with a trained eye. A field with a corner gate, for instance, is almost certain to have been founded as a meadow for livestock, since beasts are easier to herd or drive through such an arrangement.”2 The meadow lies next to a former farmhouse, too, now a family home. For a time, I’m half-attentive, falling as I am for the neighbouring property, so handsome, so old: three-light flat-faced mullioned windows in small-paned glazing, a four panel door framed by a stone architrave and pillowed frieze. There’s a pretty flower and vegetable garden, washing on a line, children’s toys.
On the other side of the wall, M and I negotiate ankle-spraining grassy ground thick with creeping thistle, dock, fat hen, builder’s rubble and plastic. So much plastic.
Thursday 24 March. A walk up the hill with Alfie.
Good grief!
We playing that oxymoron game again?
No, Alfie, look, the glasses I lost.
Simply amazing!
Wise ass.
Dear March - Come in. A poem by Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)
Lewis-Stempel, John. Woodston (p. 8). Transworld. Kindle Edition.
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I also love the video clips!
Love the video-clips, Bee - the sights and sounds are so evocative! 🌿 ✨