The gale

January 11, 2017

It woke me up.

But then, it woke everyone up, I think.

You only really find out the secrets of a new house in the dark hours during a roaring gale.

Alone, half afraid, as doors creaked and shut, creaked and shut, and the loft hatch lifted and clattered, and the windows shuddered (as if poor Cathy were at the window), I realised I’d been dreaming of you.

You escaped too quickly for me to catch you, a fleeting remembrance of a little soul but then gone; carried away on the nor-wester.

As ever, oh yes, as ever and ever, that overwhelming sense of guilt. Wracking, heart-tugging gut wrenching guilt. Somehow, in the dream, I’d failed you again. Oh poor, exhausted unconscious mind that just won’t let things be.

Sleepless hours later and a compulsion to be part of the force that was felling trees, hurling trampolines into cars and being the general topic of conversation on the happychatty local radio stations, was overwhelming.

A mind thick and overflowing and anxious and searching needs something to focus on. So be it.

Such sound! With eyes closed it might have been the roar of the sea, a wild sea; a crashing sea; metallic spume-tipped and powerful.

It howled through the telegraph wires, and cast birds and carrier bags to the skies, and the oozy muddy sucky path was strewn with a carpet of lichen-covered branches whipped from their moorings on high.

There were starlings and a grey squirrel, a robin and a coal tit and curious magpies soaring from tree to tree, always one tree ahead of me. What were they waiting  for?

Breathtaking, it was, Thomas. Truly. Literally. Cowed and hunkered, every step  towards the gusts a weighted, heavy one. Tears ripped from the eyes. Real tears? Involuntary and shed willingly and joyously.

Muscles ached and beneath the layers a heart pumping hard and deeply and healthily. Oh, breathe!

From the glittering blue, a buzzard soared overhead, carried onwards onwards without a flap of his wings.

The stream in the deep heart of the steep valley was mucky and murky and the colour of weak, milky coffee; damned in parts with leaf debris. Too deep for wellington boots. And on the other side, in a lee by a mossy wall, a great pile of leaves, hip high. The temptation to plunge into it and throw them into the air for you almost too great.

Sometimes, where the wind forced wood upon wood, it squeaked and creaked, and the sense of walking amongst dancing fairies as dry leaves whipped from the ground went frittering and tittering past, the gust at my back pushing me to join them.

From the valley bottom back up the hill and a pause, against a suitably angled solid tree to, catch the breath.

Its trunk was thick and solid and it must have been centuries old and as I leant against it, face to the sun flinking between the branches, it moved; a rocking motion - imperceptible to look at - but profound to feel. Anchored in the deep, deep earth, swaying to the motion of its wind-whipped canopy. Comforting, Comforted. A wrapping up and a wrapping round and a soulfulness. Old tree.

Pressing onwards and upwards, squelching and squerching, towards the still-rising sun which warmed and welcomed on the brow of the hill.

And then, a few short steps to home. Past the farm with the healthy pong and the road which means you’ve arrived.

The wind howls still. And snow is forecast. And the dream of you still won’t reveal itself. But so be it.

Nature, the circle of life, the cycle of life, its beginnings and its ends and the forces that surround us; that play with us that render us but motes in a big big sky. All this is reassuring. It is how it was, how it is, how it will ever be.

It’s water bottle warm in the central heated house.

And the bedroom is stifling.

Go fly then, my boy, my dream, go fly.

I open the window and the wind rushes in to claim you.