An intimacy of sounds

A fool arrives back where he started

Every spring I make a fine old fool of myself. You’d think I would have learnt by now. But no. For boneheads like me it appears that there is to be no learning. I do the same silly thing every year at the same indefinable turning of the season’s wheel which rolls into place as March gives way. Through the dark winter months I have bowed down to the sleet and the grey. I have fed our little black sheep each dawning before breakfast and absorbed the smell of wet wool and their resignation to the wind. Grown quiet and inward. Then comes a morning, much like any other, when a faint glow of joy falls like misty drizzle onto my idiot head, spreading over my scalp as if I were baptised again. Each year I mistake this distant music, these notes which change everything, for an upwelling out of some hidden store of resilience inside me. But my ears are having none of this nonsense. They nudge me awake. ‘Skylark, dunderhead.’ The first skylark of the year. The little bird is rehearsing his rising up and his flutter-flap fall back to earth, practising the arc of life and death until he has it just so. He has come, once more, to show us all how it’s done. How long had he been filling the sky with salvation before I woke from my day-dreaming of winter and heard his voice? When will I ever learn that the path has looped back around to the self-same spot? That I have stood here before and been blessed by a little bird.

With the approach of summer I grow absent-minded. Become confused by the babble of voices. To excuse myself, I claim that the penny-leaf rustle of the giant aspen outside my window has frayed all the seams of sound. True, each year, I manage to mark the day of our redemption, the hour of the first cuckoo call. But the falling silent of cuckoos? Somehow the moment of their silence evades me. At an unmarked turn in the road they have bowed out, discreetly, while I walked purposefully on, eyes on the destination, oblivious. A week later I turn to listen for them, in need of their reassurance on a dark day. But that time has passed.

The bonny seamstresses of the northern lands. Photographed by Jonas Aleksander Larsen (Shutterstock)

At the turn of the high tide of summer I make such a shameful spectacle of myself, weeping as I walk the high ridge of Birkett Fell. The helter-skelter of the year’s new growth has peaked and paused and taken a step back to admire itself. We all sense the moment. Even the tottering black-face lamb stops stock and sniffs, amazed. She had thought that time was endlessly slithering forward. Is stunned to see it begin to eat its own tail. The grouse, his young barely on the wing, has hardly time enough. He chides the hour, ‘Go-back, go back.’¹ But summer has served him notice. Up on the bare-back tops, the curlews have changed their tune. The long bubbling joy-song of their arrival back on the breeding grounds is clipped now. Just a few short syllables. As the outward migration back to the coast draws near, they ask, ‘Will we?’ … ‘Will we?’ … ‘Will we meet again?’ Through a sheen of tears I whisper, ‘Yes, my loves.’ But more as a prayer than an answer. If these bonny seamstresses of the northern lands should one year fail to stitch the shoreline to the high peaks then we are surely undone. There is no way to re-fashion the long curved darning needles which they use for the task.

Down by the river in late July I am gawky and graceless, drawn in fellowship to the crippled ash tree who holds the bank at Minnows’ Pool. Her first trunk failed, back in her grey-barked dandy days when she was wont to adorn the riverbank promenade, turning heads, twirling her parasol of fashionable ash-tree green. It was such a bitter blow. Woodpeckers drummed her withered leg into a colander. It is a wonder that she regrew, half-twined around the original stem. Today it sounds to me as if she is humming. Not a tune exactly. A harmony of notes I find familiar but cannot place. Then a honey bee lands on my arm and probes for salt or maybe for sweet, finds neither but rests for a while in the warmth. High up in the ash’s flank an old woodpecker nest-hole purrs like a cat giving sacrament.

The bee on my arm will die with all her cohort before autumn. Soon I will be forgotten. The ash tree, long after the bees have left her for a new home, will fall. None of us will follow a straight line over the horizon to immortality. Because the horizon is a circle. And we are already there.

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1. I know that some people reading this will not have lived with grouse. I have been lucky enough to be amongst them for most of my life. They really do say ‘Go back!’ (and I like to think that I do a passable impersonation of them).