I am stopped at a crossroads. It is a flat place. Lightly farmed. Rushes, ragged treelines. The fields here often more forest than farm. Some cropped close though and shorn by grazing. A neighbour I know comes from the other direction. I had lamb for him. I have left it on his kitchen table. Just come from there. He has venison and beef for me. They will wait. We stop. Talk. He guides me through butchering the cut. Parked. Window to window. Engines off.
I am off to Arigna. I have not been before. It is not on the paths I beat. Though I can see it from the hill on the farm. It is country that holds you in it – the mountains wrap close around the valley, holding the houses and villages in their folds. Arigna village feels scooped out from the earth by a giants hand. The houses cling to fingered ridges that are scarred edges of some ancient digging. The windmills dot the shoulder of the hill. Quiet giants too in the stillness of the day.
I climb the crooked hill above the village. I’ve more lamb to deliver. The valley is a green thing as I climb. Rippling emerald. Dark canvas. Lincoln and cadmium green. I have not the words for the shades. Only eyes. And heart. Which is gladdened. Before the valleys rim where the green turns to a plain of heather I turn off. To a stone house. I weigh and parse out two halves of lamb. The owner comes out. Bowed with the weight of the tools he carries. We talk while I too work. Short of time the both of us.
There’s a quiet type of kindness you know you can trust in. There are others. Loud ones. Showy and brash that don’t have the weight of their words. Lightly worn. But there’s a quiet kind. One you can trust.
Kindness clings to the shoulder of the valley here. It was down at the crossroads too. You find it stowed. Put away in people like words or treasure. The words spoken to each other, the kindness, sometimes drawn slow like stones put into a drystone wall. Deliberate. Particular. Concrete. And. Suddenly. From the slow work of our hands and conversation. Suddenly there in the landscape between us. There is a thing that’s real. A wall. A kindness. Built stone by word by word by stone. My gratitude equally concrete between us.
He asks. “Do you have firewood? If there’s any sawing you need done. If there’s work you can’t do. There are more people than you know that think of you. Ask. Just ask.” Here is that quiet kind of kindness that has the solid feel of the stone walls. Here on the cold mountain precious warmth. Another offers the hands of herself. Or her husband. We do not know one another well. It does not matter. Her call finds me in the back field. Tapping the hive there to coax out the bees. “If you have need, just ask, and himself will come help on the farm if there’s anything needs doing. And we can take the kids if needed.” I finish the call cared for. Something I had not expected while quietly tapping for bees on the side of a hill.
I talk to her husband. Bringing more lamb. He steps out into the rain with me. We talk. Longer than we’ve spoken before. Some good few minutes where only things worth saying are said. “If there is work you need doing. We have tractors. We will come. Fences. Firewood. Trees down. Children to take care of. Food to be made. Ask. Do ask. We mean it. Ask.” They drop a bag of cakes and pies to the car in the drive and a book.
You don’t always realise that there is kindness there until you have need. But it is. And you don’t always realise you have need until there is kindness.
Another man meets me at the swimming pool. “If you need help on the farm just ask. And I mean it. Ask.” He does not farm but comes from farming. He has a full time job. I know the work asks much of him. It is hard. Long hours. But I know, too, from how he speaks. He will come. He will farm with me if I need it. Sink posts in the mud. Gather and trim sheep. Drag folds in the rain. His partner will pick up shopping. Or children. Or whatever is needed. Ask. Do ask. “You look tired” she says. She drops bread and homegrown garlic and treats.
Such kindness finds me. Hunts me out. Surprises me. I did not know the kindness was there until I had need of it. But it is. Warmth. Care. The extraordinary goodness of people is bright enough to light a dark day with. Find a path with. Find a way.
I often walk the lanes. The fields. Find the unspoken words stowed in the fields and hedges. Each stone placed, each hedgerow tree planted a quiet solid word from those that laid them to we who walk amongst them if you are patient and quiet and take time to read them. The quiet tongueless stories of people who shaped their world and the people in it, and who still shape we who have inherited it. I feel the same about kindness. The said and unsaid goodness with which people shape themselves and those they bestow their gifts on. Quiet stories that unfold between us that mean the world. Shape things as much as hedgerows fields and walls do.
Thank you all. It means the world. Like Heaney said, but about something else. Kindness. It can “catch the heart off guard and blow it open”.
