Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

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.