An early start treated us to a lovely sky this morning and looked like perhaps it would be a clear day. I hurried to get a couple of loads of washing done in the hope that I could get them dry, but by lunchtime the sky was thick powder grey and the first heavy drops of rain began to fall.

I drove up the top road to town at 2.30 and the sky felt so thick and low I might have touched it! The Rooks conspire to confound me every time - this afternoon I drove against them as they straggled up into the sky and streamed back in a South-easterly direction as I drove west. I figure they keep me on my toes. It gets earlier and earlier, these darkening days, that they begin their long evening rituals towards roosting. Days like today, when so much of it is shrouded in heavy cloud which blocks out the light so early, they have so little light...

For myself, there were two frustrations with the rain today, one being the washing still not dry. The other is that the garlic still no planted, but then I was perfectly capable of going out and doing it in the rain, I was just being lame and feeling the cold! But FB and I stayed in and made paper fishes. I'd thought we might use them to decorate the house at christmas time, but I'm sure he'll have other ideas for them. This evening he was overcome with tiredness and flopped in my arms for an hour before bedtime and I held him and rocked him and marvelled at his beauty... I caught a little tiny fleeting glimpse of old days, when he was tiny, and I would hold him in my arms like that, close to me, rocking gently... These days I don't often get such long periods of uninterrupted holding. I want him to feel ok, but I can enjoy the prolonged holding and the very physical, embodied memories of his tiny self that it brings me. I wonder how he got so big, how we came so far and in such darkness. I can feel sad at the time we spent struggling through the darkness, but it's good to be in the light, eyes open wide, finding our way easily, hand in hand, together...

We have come a long way, my boy and I, and it hasn't been easy, but there's a level at which that's part of the intense joy now - that it is easy now! That it's simple at last for the two of us to step lightly through our days. There are seeds of new thoughts and ideas already, and here I am, with the world slowing around me, but already I anticipate the quickening in my bones - I know it's coming. But in the meantime, we'll step lightly and easily - there's no hurry. We've only ourselves to please and the way is bright and clear. We'll wait for the midwinter baying of the foxes, we'll wait for snow and snowdrops, we'll wait through the quiet and still and we'll listen for the quickening and we'll follow it wherever it leads us.