This is a post from February. It’s April now. Better late than never I guess. In February, the Beast From The East hit, bringing cold, snow, frozen water lines, hungry animals and hard work.
It’s cold and clear and bright. Cold enough to make it weather to work in. The air crackles on my skin. These bright days are to be savoured. The sun touches your skin. there’s a kind of brittle warmth to the frozen light. It leaches in, past your skin. Lights you up inside if you spend enough time with it.
The farm is filled with absences. The hands that built the old stone walls that grip the hills in great limestone lengths generations ago. Each stone a stowed and silent word laid on the land by hands lost even to memory. The hands that cut and hewed the old ash trees a human life ago. The ruined old houses and farms half buried in the forest. The old green road that cuts the farm in two. People would clamber down that road to school or market. To the church or to the dance. Lost lives swallowed up by the coniferous green of the spruce plantation that we border on. The road, the stone walls, and the stories still there to be seen though if you can read them. All are absences that remain still and linger. I’m thinking of my friend. Gone now. But lingering. An absence that still speaks.
The brightness sits well with me but February is a hungry month for the farm. Time to step out into the clear sun and work.
I pick a red handled pair of secateurs that will sit completely unused in my pocket. Old, cantankerous, they no longer work well. Much like myself these winter months. But I miss my friend. They were a gift from her. I carry them with me because it feels as if she is with me when I do. Peeking over my shoulder as I farm. Telling me to gather great armfuls of what green I can. They sit in my back pocket. I carry both them and her with me into the cold bright light.
Hello old friend, you are with me.
I go to the far fields where the rams clip the last blades of last years grass. It’s a hungry month so they crop the tops of bitter and thick green rushes. They are the very last thing a herbivore would eat. My sheep are hungry.
My friend would be proud. I clip thick tangled armfuls of brambles with my actually working secateurs. The wild Blackberry came into leaf in late January, the stalks sending out leafy runners to colonise the bare earth. Splashes of sweet and green in the grey and brown world of the the bone bare hedgerows.
I gather up the green. The Rams are eyeing me, following me along the fenceline, snatching at any sweet tendrils that spill over the fence. They are keyed to the shades of green, a colour they spot with the tenacity of a wild thing. They sprunk…that front feet stamping little dance that Rams do, they clash and butt horns. The sweet green must taste of spring to them. It’ s strung them with instinctual tension.
I return two hours later and they have cleaned the hundred five foot stems I cut of everything. Leaves, buds, shoots. Tomorrow I’ll return and cut some more, clear the drive and the field margins of what brambles I can, and watch my stock mob the sweet green leaves in the cold bright light.
I’ll carry a red secateurs in my back pocket. And I’ll think of the gifts of goodness that she gave. And I will think she would approve of the care I give.
