Holding Post…

Could it really be that two months and indeed a whole season have passed me by since I last wrote here? This morning on the way to the shops I was jolted awake by yet another sign of time passing – the rowdy screeching of swifts overhead, the first I’ve heard this year. Despite the cold, it must be summer.

With every passing sign of spring – the first snowdrop, the first lesser celendine, the first wood anemone, bluebell, swallow sighting… I’ve been wanting to write and celebrate. There hasn’t been the time though, so even though I note these changes and absorb their import they have passed here in silence. It’s felt so wrong, and now that I’ve started writing again I can barely collect the discipline together to figure out what I have to say. There are the swallows, and bluebells, and Beltane woods, and a feeling of the headlong rush of life that has broken the banks of spring and flooded into summer already. I feel knocked over and swept away by the flow of it all of it all… and then I have to go and do the chores.

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Why “The Birds In The Meadow”?

As a child I was a tomboy. I spent entire summer days belly down in the dirt of the local pond, scrabbling for tadpoles and sticklebacks and dragonfly larvae. Other days would be spent looking for skylark and lapwing nests in the meadows near my home – not for any destructive, nest robbing purpose; this was pure fascination and the thrill of discovery. One day I went to the pond with my plastic bucket and jamjar to find it being drained – living things drowning in air and mired in mud flopped helplessly at my feet. In the coming months a housing development laid waste to the meadows with the birds in them; the pond had been drained to ensure none of us kids would fall into it.

As an adult I am still a tomboy. I’ll still spend an entire day crouched staring into any gnat infested body of water if you’ll let me, and I still notice the little things. Sometimes I’ll write about what I’ve seen, just to try to make sense of it all. I may appear to think small, but my aims are big important ones. I want to make sure that there will always be ponds for kids to fall into if they want, and I think there should always, always be meadows filled with birds.

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