Fieldfares

These are good times, because they are the only times.

A sense of permanence is lost in the bereavement process and today, sitting at my desk watching the clouds build and then collapse, as doors slam shut and buckets tumble about in the garden I feel grateful. It’s not always like this, but as I spend more and more time on my feet, moving through the landscapes I love, my thoughts come to rest more easily on gratitude. Transience and mortality seem so piercingly natural at times like this, not something to fight, or make sense of. Something to hold carefully in your hands like you might a butterfly or a broken light bulb.

Earlier, the wind was building frantically, and just as the rain began to splatter the window I found myself in a natural break from my work so headed out for a jog around the block. Descending through steep woodland, sheltered from the wind and rain, I dodged fallen branches and hopped over the stile in the wall, feeling light and awake for the first time all day. The wind sounded like surf in the tree tops and as I left the wood at the bottom it lurched across the field in gusts, blowing me from the path. Along the road, an odd coincidence of timing meant the siren of an ambulance started just as the rain became torrential. There were storm debris all over the footpath and I had my head down tacking against the showers, a wheelie bin fell over and a man held his hood across his face as he walked towards the bus stop.

Turning back up the hill and out of the wind I enjoyed the climb up the old track towards some more woodland. Leaves were flying past me horizontally and the rain had really kicked in, now pouring down my face. As the path steepened through some bracken I met a guy with his dog, his red coat was tied tight around his face but his dog was free, steaming, weaving.

“You’ve picked your time!” he said

“I certainly have”

And I had. All the irony in my intonation was through a sense of politeness. Because this is when to run. No doubt if the day was baking under tedious blue skies and a gentle breeze I’d have skipped all this, I wasn’t planning to run today. But the wind thrashing around like this, the broken skies and sideways rain bring some of the mountains down and it’s irresistible. After that steep section the route levels out through some woodland. Jogging along that path I thought back to the big freeze in February when I’d walk up here every day for a week. I’d booked holiday but we stayed at home, maybe because of the weather or maybe because Ali was too ill, I can’t remember. But we were snowed in for a few days and I walked this loop via Co-op daily, to get Rabbit out and to buy our evening meal.

Leaving Ali at home with the fire blazing and everything she needed for an hour or two meant I could focus on the silent, frozen landscape, exercise my legs, maybe even try to process some of what was going on. As the week progressed though, I became increasingly concerned about the birds. Some fieldfares – winter migrants who come to the UK from the east looking for berries – were knocking about near the woods. I bought a bag of apples, which they like, and placed them in some trees and on a little mound that is usually covered in heather but was thick with frozen snow. I’m not sure how long I waited for them, but enough time passed for me to become really cold, I was anxious to see them arrive for food, see their grey heads and spotty chests. They never turned up, so the next day I moved some of the apples but still no peck marks, in fact they never came all week. Rather than assume they’d found other food, I panicked they’d not found this food and I wondered about cutting the apples up, or moving them down the hill, nearer to the garden I’d seen them in.

Each morning I’d defrost the bird bath and after we ran out of food I baked a big cake for all the sparrows and tits, it was full of all our expensive nuts and seeds and they never touched it. I got to the point where I couldn’t think about much else but the birds, their struggle against the relentless winter was all consuming and a couple of times it became too much. I thought about their tiny hearts fluttering against the cold, about the race for life the fledglings had won over summer only to be faced with this frozen, foodless desert. And I thought about them at night, whilst Ali slept beside me, full of chemotherapy drugs and painkillers. I wondered where they slept and how I might manage to do the same.

Running around there today, past all those trees where the apples were hung, up those same paths, warm now, full of worms and bugs, running past Rowan trees overflowing with berries, running under a sky that blew as hard with rain as it did pigeons, I realised for the first time that those fluttering little hearts I’d cried for in winter were just spray flung high from a torrent, a raging torrent at which I couldn’t look.

These are good times though, because they are the only times. To see permanence flutter away on the wind, to know we are all gone in a gust, is to be alive. The season is on the move, birds are starting to flock and geese have taken to the skies once more, arriving here for our mild winter. Soon enough the fieldfares will be here too, and when it snows you’ll find me up the lane with a bag of apples, even if the fieldfares don’t.