Blackberry Daydreams

 

It seems to be a good year for blackberries - or perhaps it's just because my workload has lessened dramatically due to the pandemic and I have the unaccustomed luxury of enough time to wander, harvesting the hedgerows.

The September air is cool, with still a touch of warmth when the sun breaks through. Abundant clusters of blackberries hang among the tangle of brambles. I push my way in, thorns snagging my clothes and hair. Delicately I pluck the tender berries and the pile in my basket grows rapidly. Despite my care, my fingers are soon stained with purple juice, and my arms and hands scratched. 

The blackberries look to me like tiny jewelled ornaments, each tiny drupelet like a shining bead of jet or onyx. They are a treasure, an abundant late-summer gift of delicious fruit that can be enjoyed in the moment or harvested and transformed into preserves to bring a taste of summer in the depths of winter. Across the valley the jays screech in the oaks as they harvest and stash their own winter treasure trove of acorns. The jays and I, preparing for the unknown times ahead, gratefully gather the plenty that is offered us. We know that nothing is certain.

As we take, we give too. We help the blackberries and oaks by dispersing their seeds. Jays (along with squirrels) are actually responsible for planting the vast majority of oak trees. They bury acorns to keep as a winter food source - and acorns need to be covered with soil to germinate. A single jay can collect up to 5,000 acorns so it's inevitable that some of their haul will remain buried and later sprout into new trees. Likewise, the seeds of consumed blackberries pass unharmed through the digestive tracts of birds, animals and humans and are distributed when they re-emerge at the end of the process! The blackberries, the jays, the oak trees, remind me that we are all part of the intricately woven and interconnected web of life.

My basket is almost full but still I comb the thicket for more treasure, peering up and down, side to side. It's amazing how a small change in the way I look at the brambles suddenly reveals new, previously hidden berries hanging in ripe clusters. What a good reminder of the importance of trying to see things from all sides and being flexible!

I pop berries in my mouth, enjoying the sweet, tangy juices - and I throw some to the eager chickens too. That's another important thing to remember - when you have plenty - share it! The blackberries give generously and it is good to follow their example. 

At last, I head back to the house. The sun, now low in the sky, slants golden light across the fields and I take a few moments to sit on the bench that overlooks the valley and watch the rooks circling their rookery in preparation for the oncoming night. Tawny owls call to each other. The air smells of the berry juice on my fingers, the spearmint next to the bench that I brushed past, and woodsmoke from a neighbour's bonfire. My hands are scratched and my hair is dishevelled but I have a basket full of ripe blackberries and the jays have their acorns. We are blessed, and we know it. 

Counting My Blessings

A day bright with birdsong and apple blossom. Scatters of mayflies drift dreamily across the sunlit valley. The bluebells are in their full glory - but in lockdown I can't make my usual sacred pilgrimage to them. They call to me, and I'm sad that I can't go and immerse myself in their beauty. 

Yet I am grateful too. There is so much for which to be grateful. That I live in a world of marvels like bluebells and swallows and apple blossom. That I am here in this beautiful place to experience another spring. That even in lockdown I can walk down the lane taking eggs to Mair (I leave them in the mailbox at the end of her driveway, she leaves an empty eggbox with payment inside for me to collect), and commune with the hedgerow flowers - including bluebells. The scent of appleblossom wafts by and the swallows joyfully chatter overhead. I am blessed.

Taking Eggs to Mair Part 2

Today, having been ill with a 24-hour bug, I forgot to take a box of eggs down the hill to Mair until 9pm.

The walk down couldn't have been more different to last week. This week I walked in rainy dark, not sun. And I thought of all the times I have walked up and down this hill in the 11 years I have lived at Halfway Up A Hill. I have walked in sun, in rain, in wind, in snow, by moonlight and in pitch dark. I have walked at dawn, and midday, and afternoon, at twilight and at night. I have walked in spring and summer and autumn and winter.

This evening it was still just light enough not to need the torch I took with me. Rain streaming off the fields ran down the edges of the road. Bareheaded, I enjoyed the sensation of raindrops on my hair. The only sound was falling rain, and the rushing of the swollen stream. No owls, no foxes, even the sheep were silent in the fields. Accompanied only by the bats swooping overhead. The smell of rain and woodsmoke. Down in the valley the few street lights glowed orange; the headlights of an occasional car swept along the road. Across the hills, the scattered lights of surrounding farms. Back up this hill, only the warm glow of lights at Halfway Up a Hill are visible.


Isn't this one of the ways we connect with the spirit of a place? By repeating a journey, an action, a chore, week after week so that we experience the place in all its many moods and modes? I am envious of the people whose families have walked these hills for generations. I imagine a bone-deep knowledge of the land.  My own relationship with this land will never have those accumulated ages of connection. But I approach the spirit of this place in friendship, with respect and openness. And as I open to Her, she opens to me and reveals Her many layers. Like any relationship, work, patience and understanding are required. But the rewards are well worth it.

Gossip, Rumour & Hearsay

One of the cliches about small rural communities is that everyone knows everyone else's business. And like most cliches, this one is based in truth, as I have been finding out in the last few months.

One reason is that many people are related to each other - families that have been in the area for hundreds of years in many cases have intermarried into a tangled tapestry of threads that is often hard to un-knot. I was recently cautioned by a fellow in-comer, 'Be careful what you say to one person about another - you never know whose aunt or cousin they may be!'. This seems to be wise advice.

As an in-comer, I have found the level of interest in other people's lives both sweet and touching - these people care about each other - and also somewhat bizarre and unsettling. My elderly neighbour, for example, loves to ring me up when there is a funeral and tell me all about the deceased, their virtues, vices, peccadilloes, likes and dislikes, even if I have no idea who she's talking about. And then she will tell me who was at the funeral, what they said, what they wore, what they thought about the deceased... again, I only know a fraction of the people she is talking about and often feel like an unintentional eavesdropper. Discomfort arises when she tells me about the things people have done that she disapproves of. I am clearly supposed to condemn these poor strangers for their sins, even though I know only my neighbour's version of their shortcomings. Mostly I umm and ahhh noncommittally and hope she'll soon find another topic.

Most discomforting of all is the recent realisation that I too am the subject of neighbourhood gossip. For example, at the end of last summer - more than a year after T and I had split - I was invited to a wedding. My invitation included a 'plus one', so I asked IB (who I had been seeing for several months by then) to accompany me. The wedding was lovely, I knew about a quarter to a third of the people there and was introduced to many more. When we returned home, a friend who hadn't been at the wedding rang to say that before the wedding had even finished, a neighbour (who also hadn't been at the wedding) rang her to ask why I was at the wedding with a man who was Not My Husband. Someone else - presumably a wedding guest - had rung him to report on my presumed infidelity and brass neck in showing off my fancy man to all and sundry. What really amazed me was that anyone who actually knew me, knew that T and I had split, and that I had started seeing someone. Surely only people who know me would be interested in my private life? Obviously that isn't the case!

Subsequently, I have met people locally for the first time, and in beginning to converse with them have found that they already know I'm divorced, where I live, that my parents have recently moved into the area... in short, they know exactly who I am and quite a lot of detail about my private life. I find this all quite bewildering. How can I be so interesting that perfect strangers are exchanging details of my life with each other. Why would they even want to know?

Perhaps I'm strange in not being that curious about other people. I take an interest in the lives of people I know, but I can't get my head around the notion of nosing into the affairs of strangers... or perhaps that's it. Perhaps I'm no longer a stranger, perhaps I have taken my first step onto the (long) ladder of being accepted as part of the local community. That is a nicer way of framing it!

Either way, I have taken perverse delight in throwing petrol on the gossip inferno by allowing the son of another neighbour to park his car on my drive for the time being. It's a simple 'helping each other out' scenario - he needs somewhere to park his SORN*-ed vehicle, and it benefits me to have a car parked on the drive even when I'm not here so it looks like there's someone in. However, I am now a Divorced Woman (and we all know what they're like...), IB is still on the scene, and now another single man's car is parked outside my house... I can just imagine what they're saying down at the local Tafarn**

"Have you heard about that Moonroot at Halfway Up A Hill - what a hussy! Well I never - do you know, she..."

* SORN = Statutory Off Road Notice. In the UK, when a car is not licensed it is issued with a SORN, one condition of which is that it is not parked on the public highway.

** Tafarn - Tavern or pub.

I Live in a Beautiful Place

Last night as I drove down dark country lanes on my way home from a planning meeting for next week's Winter Solstice ritual, the moon rose, huge, yellow, serene. So beautiful I had to sing to Her as I drove.



This morning, the land was again white with frost and gold with early sunlight. Every surface was edged with tiny twinkling ice crystals. The sky was blue, with clouds as soft and white as angel wings.

I live in a beautiful place. When we first moved here, I wondered if I would become immune to the beautiful views, if familiarity would breed if not contempt then perhaps indifference. But that has not happened at all. I am still often halted in my tracks by the beauty that surrounds me here, Halfway up a Hill.

Yet the moon would be just as beautiful viewed from an inner city window, the frost just as magical. Even the most uninspiring ingredients such as motor oil and a muddy puddle can combine to produce glorious swirling rainbows.

I live in a beautiful place - but then again, we all do.