Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

The moon is a frozen pond. It is The Snow Moon. The Hunter’s Moon. Someone says a lunar eclipse will happen this night. And a comet! We are like children with torches forecasting midnight feasts… But we slumber deep, lungs with cold air replete, minds a-wander. An early start. Wake to the sparsest spaced flakes - ten to a cubic furlong, perhaps. (Perhaps we dreamt this precise detail?) Blearish eyes are rubbed. Ahead, a deer, in no danger from ice-wary driving, springs across tarmac. From a canopy’s winter bones, an owl swoops, parallel. In a blink, a hedge bird breaks our reveries. Clips the car, sends feathers a-puff.

Without the dead ash looming, we had lost our sense of where our drive is. Each time we missed, reversed, reminded ourselves to find a stump and a grand wood pile: that’s where we live. The altered reference. We are getting used to it. Yesterday Storm Doris broke the legs of Lily Scare-the-Crow. Literally weather beaten! Was this venting frustration, now storms cannot break branches from the chopped tree? When Lily was our new scarecrow, we would reverse under precarious boughs, be startled by the  person in the rear view mirror, the flat wooden figure with the child-drawn face. Now, after remembering where we live, we are startled to not find a face. Lily has never scared a crow, nor lost her smile. She is, rakishly, propped in the lea of the lean-to. ‘What new times are these, Lily?’ I ask. ‘How will we know where we are?’ Ask your heart, she says (it’s what I hear). And I think, that’s rich, when you don’t have one: but she’s never scared a crow, nor lost...