Circles

There was a hard frost this morning - I had expected as much; despite the boiler having been fixed and our finally having a decent, efficient (and affordable!) heat source, somehow last night I never quite felt warm... So we woke to a treat of a sparkling landscape - all the trees, grass and fields touched with white. Magical.

FB and I had a slow mooch of a morning, leisurely breakfast, dishes, cleaning (he's a whizz with the hoover!), changing beds... I had thought we could do some baking together and maybe have a walk in the afternoon, collect some leaves, maybe... But he had other ideas, announcing firmly that he wanted to go to his granny's house. So away we went through the sparkling lanes (the rosehips will be good now, after that frost...) with FB pointing out all the little way-markers (the railway line, the Beech wood, the house with the red leaves, the church, the old pump...) that show him the way to Granny's house. He almost fell over himself so eager was he to get into her embrace and return to her the jelly bag I had borrowed, that he had carefully held onto all the way there so that he could be the on to give it to her. He then spent the entire day cooking with his granny - bread, biscuits, scrubbing potatoes, making breadcrumbs...

I'm minded of how we come full circle - it seems not long ago that I was 3, 4, 5, at my own granny's knee in her Scottish kitchen. I would wait greedily for her offer to lick the bowl - and cared not at all if it was sticky cake mixture or the faint aluminium taste of deliciously salty and buttery mashed potato - anything that came from her hand (or her oven) was delicious and devoured. How I love that FB loves to cook and that he is able to enjoy that same special and magical relationship with his Granny that I had with mine.

The circles go on and on, spiralling in and out, overlapping, interweaving - the circle of my return here to Yorkshire; the circles of life and love within and between my family, my extended family; the inward turn with the cycle of the year, mirroring my own internal processes as I slow down, take time to reflect on the shifting tides of change that have been so present this year; my taking up the projects that were my own mothers during her early mothering years; my feeling rooted once more in a landscape that belongs to me and I to it, and the new shoots that grow from such rootedness...

What I know is that is that there is real joy stirring in me, a joy that I had never quite managed to realise was never quite present for far too long. Better late than never. Indeed it is - FB has not always had the best of me in his first years of life (though he's always had enough), but my, how we both revel in the joy we are able to share now. Better late than never. The circle turns and spirals on, and we both grow, our roots settled and well-nourished.

A thrush's song

Woke early (curtesy of FB!) on Saturday and was treated to the early sun turning the world to red. FB opened his curtains and squealed with the delight at the tree-full of rooks outside his window, calling for me to come and see. The air was cold and we loafed in bed together as long as possible, watching the sunlight turn from red to pale butter yellow as it rose, eventually hunger over-riding our desire for the warmth of blankets and cuddles.

I made a rare trip into the city this weeked - lured only by the promise of some good music and my sister - her band were playing. It felt strange driving in - the lanes and hedgerows fell away behind me and were replaced by concrete, lights, bars and restaurants - a city that was once my home and now feels as alien as another planet to me...

But the arts centre became a haven with my little sister's welcoming smile and warm hugs. The music filled me - Hanna's strange, ever-shifting vocals, Chris's bouzouki and clarinet and the warmth of his deep voice on the occasions he sang, my sister, Aby, playing viola or twisting her fingers at her side as she sang, rich and mellow, to complement Hanna's vocal swoops and curls... And as I listened, I was transported home again as they sang a thrush's song, the song of the Little Bear in the Land of Northern - it isn't always my own country, but it's wild and open and home none the less.

Home again, I play the CDs and sink again into a world of dark, ancient, Northern folk tales that, like all ancient story-telling traditions, echoe deep in the cells of all our bodies on one level or another.

I remember the part the music plays in the shaping of me, how, like landscape, music sits at the very core of me. So what of the city?! I had it all wrong, driving in, focussed on the landscape I was leaving behind - what I found when I arrived was as alive as any garden, any vista of fields, any hedgerow swarming with life, any rookery! And who cares what concrete monstrosities, who cares what heaviness of memory resides, what childhood insecurities or terrors - it's all gone, always, in the light of my sister's smile, and little else matters.

Home is here, undoubtedly, but it is also within me. And I would do well to hold on to that.

Do have a look - http://www.myspace.com/68732431

Wild is the Wind

Yesterday started brightly, but there was a high wall of pale cloud that built over the course of the day til it threatened snow in the early evening. The wind whipped up alongside the gathering clouds, lifting the leaves of the trees so that they showed their undersides, looking like flashes of silver amongst the green and gold. By early afternoon the wind was howling round the corners of the house and screaming through cracks in the doors and window frames. I remembered how afraid I had been of the howls of the wind as a child - I remember hiding under the table in the kitchen in Suffolk, imagining the wind as some wild creature, bound to 'get me' were it not for the safety provided by my mother's knees as she stood at the table kneading bread dough...

My son, FB, was not as concerned with the wind as he was by the pheasant calls he heard as we walked a little circuit around the village - up the lane past Church Wood, almost as far as the top road, and back again through fields (pasture and the remains of corn) towards the house. He refused to accept that the noise he heard was something as ordinary and unthreatening as a pheasant, and was suddenly very keen to hold my hand - it didn't last. He collected prizes along the way - a stick for poking cow shit, and a dry leaf, which he minced in the garlic crusher when we got home and has since refused to throw away.

The rooks came in to roost earlier than usual, alongside an early twilight - they came streaming in from the North-West, some skilfully surfing the strong air currents, others being buffetted about all over the place and seeming to arrive at their destination far more by luck than judgement. FB and I watched them from his bedroom window - the best vantage point. "I like rooks", he told me, which pleased me, but of course, truth be told, he likes most things you happen to be talking about at any given moment (with the possible exception of food).

I spent a cold evening listening to the wind make it's way through the huge number of holes that there appear to be in the house, and knitting a baby blanket that should have been completed in August - when the baby was born - but will now make a lovely Christmas present! I was glad of the knitting - I spread it over my knees as I worked - at least they were warm.

So it was a surprise this morning to wake and find the early sun high and pale, and the air still, with no trace of yesterday's wildness. And as the day wore on, that buttery sun even managed to find a little warmth. We celebrated by having a festival of creating - making soup and spelt bread and apple jelly - followed by a festival of indulgence - there's not a great deal better than bread buttered straight from the oven with sweet honey-coloured jam. FB doesn't often seem to really enjoy eating, but even he managed to fall quiet for a few minutes while he ate, finishing with a grin and chin full of dribbled butter and sticky cheeks.

A beginning...

Rooks - and all their corvid cousins, Raven, Crow, Jackdaw, Magpie - have always been metaphors and symbols for me. Of course, exactly how those symbols manifested has always shifted over time - both for time itself, and the increased knowledge and awareness time brings, and for changes in mood, atmosphere, myself... Time was, it was Crow and Raven who spoke most deeply to me, seemeing to respresent some dark, solitary, romantic artistry that I thought (hoped) was somehow akin to myself - a very teenage fantasty, and somewhat wide of the mark, but perhaps very typical!

These days, it is Rooks who hold me. I watch them, these autumn evenings when the light is pale and the shadows long. They pool in the field opposite the house, collecting quietly like a dark lagoon in the centre of the field. They form a tight group, though sometimes a few birds fly up lightly and move over the group, alighting on another side to take advantage of a new opportunity to pick in the grass for food. As the evening gathers, the group quietens further, waiting... Then there is a barely perceptable ripple of excitement, a shiver of anticipation, and quite suddenly, the whole flock rises, a joyous cacophony of calls as the birds lift from the field and take to the darkening sky, their small bodies floating impossibly, sometimes wildly like rags on the wind, sometimes in more graceful, purposeful swoops and arcs. It is a wild and joyful, heartlifting moment to watch - this huge community of family moving together, delighting in their bodies, in their comrades, in their Rook-ness as they perform their outlandish aeronautical displays. Sometimes the display ends sharply as the group suddenly disperses and the birds stream off towards a Rookery to the north of here, other times, the cloud of Rooks lifts and drifts and settles in the trees opposite the house til dawn...

I once wrote, many years ago, and with little understanding of the real meaning behind my words, that Rooks are old, old friends. Old friends have the ability to root oneself - to be at once an anchor to a particular moment in time, and a firm, safe grounding from which to grow. And I had not realised, these last ten years, how that anchor was missing. Not, of course, that there were no Rooks - I saw them in their ones, twos, threes, wheeling alongside Jackdaws over the railway embankment at the bottom of the garden, perched, calling to unknown, unseen colleagues from the top of the telegraph pole... But neither they nor I fully belonged in that landscape, and so I gathered together what I could of ten years and left - 250 miles away to where the Rooks throng in their hundreds, to a landscape where they and I are held, rooted - home. Home in Rook Country.