Airedale |

Keep aloft the day

Posted on Jun 3, 2021 by kylienorman

Here the day is dusking to its close, and at its setting – as at a signal –

clouds of mayflies appear. The sun unlocks them from the water,

ripe, wriggling out of carapace – impatient to be together.

Now the time for surfacing and shedding selves; now for flight.

They are the gloaming’s lumineers – late this year –

now thickening the air in clouds of light; sluggish at first

to companion one another. No longer nymphs, but made other.

Ambition lifts them high, helicoptering the sky; tails beating, mating.

They are flinching light. In their propellered flight

there is struggle and fight – the will for life.

I recognise this catching fire:

they dance of furious desire – to live and multiply and stay.

Birthing at the close; lasting no more than a day.

The sun that conjured them slowly sinks out of sight, lengthening shadows.

Dashing themselves against the last of its light, the mayflies

are at their most ephemerally bright. For one perfectly suspended golden hour,

they hold the night at bay, and keep aloft the day.

Soak-walking

Posted on Nov 5, 2019Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

I sit on the train after work homeward-bound, watching raindrops pearl on the outside of the dirty, fogged window pane. They skitter down the strange reinforced plastic which half hides the Aire-valley-view, muddying it and keeping it beyond reach. I decide, as though it were an act of rebellion, that I’m for a walk. I turn the thought around for a while, wondering if I really mean to risk the rain. My mind anticipates the sharp cold shock to my skin, but part of me knows the glory there can be in rain: in the loosening of the sky’s burdens, a catharsis. Having filed into the station and then the train – acquiescing grudgingly to diesal air – I suddenly want out of the funk, the many small irritations that amass cumulatively through the work day which slowly compress and dull the soul: make the body small. When I enter the train, my body is no longer mine but communal – here just to sardine in with strangers for a vexed 20 minutes. I float somewhere above myself, above the hot press of bodies and odours. But out of those scratched barrier windows, beyond the faces bluescreen-illuminated, cramped over their phones, I know that everything is getting a little greener in the washing of the rain. So I alight at my stop with jittery anticipation and, coming back to myself by slow degrees, let my feet take me for a soak-walk down by the canal, where I may get a little greener too.

It is June and the elderflowers are opening up clotted cream umbels and the rain is knocking scent off them like a child emptying perfume bottles. The air is all citrus and grape and nectar as I round the corner over the railway bridge and down to the canal. It has been a naive Spring of warmth, blossom-plenty and precocity as though it fancied itself Summer, jealous of a younger sister. May pressed days of close heat upon us – signs of the year brewing to its best – but the chill slap of rain today gives the lie to this. Rain on my glasses and in my eyes is constant pinprick surprise to my senses: feel this, it says.

I have walked the Leeds-Liverpool canal towpath many times, but today’s rain renders it at its active best: making the canal anew, freshening it and adding to its watery DNA. I don’t take in anything but the action of rain on water at first – and I am literally taking it in, absorbing it into my skin, become amphibian. Rain in its different grades has different personalities and thus a rich lexicon has endeavoured to express the different types of rain and its differing moods. This rain is kelching, hossing, siling down: a soss, a sope, a soak of rain. More than a shower but shy of a storm. Stairrods perpendicular to the canal and ground. It is insistent yet playful: hard and nagging like a child with constant questions at your ear, but refreshing and ozone too. It keeps company with me until I am all sensation: wet-waxed hanks of hair snake my forehead and neck; rain-wash coats my hands; cool humid damp is between my clothing and back. It is all encompassing. Constant white noise as a myriad raindrops crack the surface tension. Water, at least for a while, is the dominant element, coating everything in its thin chromatic, electrifying sheen. It brings harsh percussion to the canal’s surface, and turmoil underneath, as silt and sediment are churned and tossed over – more likely than not – discarded shopping trolleys, pallets and pipes, the usual canal finds. I am reduced to membrane, taking in the rain and giving up the day in exchange.

My new-made selkie-skin, after the deadening train commute, is brought to life again, goose-pimpling with hairs raised on end. My eyes search hungrily for the fish-kisses that fat raindrops make on the water, sounding out desire. Transformed from its usual sluggish drawl, the canal is come to muddy life, its surface respiring and dancing as it pocks and heaves, fumbling for rhythm with bubble-jumble. Today it is made river, moving and acting a part, no longer still but vital and full of flow. At the lock it sluices down the overflows, bordered with valerian at their margins, and making right the levels above and below.

The path bubbles angrily between the rain-blatters that are little reservoirs under my boots. Sensation is forcefully returned to me and I begin to notice other life around me. A heron is hunting on the opposite bank, though its manner of hunting is entirely patient, still, watchful; waiting for its prey to swim close. Its head is down-bent, intent, death in its ancient gaze. Blackbirds love the rain, jouncing along in the open, turning their mustard beaks into the soil for surfacing worms. No birds sing. There is now an almost-skip to my step along the clashy churn of the path. Unpeopled by the rain-shy, this path is my chosen company. Under the action of the incessant rain, I feel myself become buoyant, light-hearted, acted upon too, as I pass below the waxy-wet canopies of ivied hawthorn, oak and chestnut, that drop heavy raindrops on my head and shoulders. The oaks were slow to leaf in Spring, their acid green buds opening minutely, conjured slowly, as though the sap were still sleeping. How ebony their barks look now under the darkening of the rain as their branches twist against the sky, the green of their fledged leaves brilliant and popping on the eye.

Down below, something dark and little is moving awkwardly from the canal and across the tow path, almost perfectly camouflaged under the rain’s tumult, making me pause to identify it from its hobbled movements. Something emerging from the primordial ooze, carefully, articulating its disgust for land with slow joints and crabbed, webbed fingers. Moving like the first life form that ever left the first swamp, unimpressed by the uncooperative nature of this new element. Its webbed hands, almost bent back upon themselves, bear it along with obvious effort: its skin bears a hallmark gnarliness. A toad! With surprise and delight cast upon my face, I approach. The rain has made its bumped back reflective and glossy like volcanised rock, polished to a gleam. It seems heedless of my presence, shoveling its feet laboriously behind it, but I see it knows I’m here with that preternatural sense that wild things have. It stops at my advance even though it’s facing away from me. Has the fury of the rain driven it from its accustomed swimming holes? And, half-drowned, is it making for the cover of tree scrub, hauling itself doggedly over slick mud and grass, for a break? I leave it to its task.

I am walking past the stream where I saw a dipper skip down the water bubbling down to the river. The memory of this encounter always provokes me to examine the place closely for a second sighting – but all I have ever conjured is the afterglow of that first encounter. After almost three years of living here (and still a newcomer), I am slowly mapping the neighbourhood with my memories of the things I have experienced here. Such mapping is the mind’s way of working itself into a place, of connecting. The vestiges of things seen and experienced are – as the word suggests – like clothes or skins we shed along the way and then put on again when we are inclined to walk these ways again. These kinds of topographies are personal, particular and one of the most important ways in which places work themselves into us as well. Maps are another kind of membrane, allowing for exchange between personal encounter and memory and place. There are vestiges of myself left forever in the wild, as long as memory and place co-exist.

Wetchered, that is to say wet through after rain, I return to my own front door unburdened like the sky of its load. Rain is such a small word.

The Day of the Corvids

Posted on Dec 13, 2017Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

As seen in the February 2018 issue of Dalesman magazine.

Last night was snow-cold, the wind coming in from the west, whistling down the chimney, and I went to bed with an extra blanket and a childish hope for snow (the proper job stuff) come morning. I woke to a bright white light streaming in through the uncurtained sliver of window and rushed to see – not the immense powdery drifts of my childhood when mum would dress me in the pink “Michelin” body suit – but a clear sky with a wafer moon hung past its time and a thin crisping of snow, gift of the night. Enough to put a smile on my face and call me outdoors.

A snow day and its promise of adventure prove that snow transforms the spirit just as much as the landscape it blankets. I have a spring in my step as I begin my walk to Trench Meadows to watch the birds, ignoring the sullen portent of the one-for-sorrow magpie on its straight arrow-flight – the first corvid of the day, part of the genus which includes rooks, ravens, crows, jackdaws and jays. Snow crystals encrust the roof tiles and duvet the cars. The pavements are rinked with ice and puddles are crackle-glazed with it. The feet retain a memory of how to walk on snow – of how it crunches and makes an awkward impression of the foot and, compacted, slides me as I go. Firing off the top of Baildon Moor, a cold hard sun etches everything sharply, chiselling at it like a knife. Reaching a grassy verge, I put my hand down to touch a snow wavelet (only word for it) and find it a surprise to the skin: hard and smooth as glass and tingling with cold.

On the way I stop by a hornbeam hedge I know to listen in on the sparrows that have set up residence inside, chirruping busily, invisibly and it must be said very loudly so that you cannot help but stop to wonder at the commotion as you pass. Hidden within their hedge stronghold, their cries are a playful “nothing to see here.” Just flashes of colour arcing between the close-grown branches. Pausing with my ear cocked towards it, I feel like Gulliver in Lilliput, wondering what all the different twitterings mean. Great tits swoop exuberantly from small front garden trees in flashes of yellow and warn each other of my approach. While among the birds, my presence is foretold along the hedgerows as that of an intruder.

Trench Meadows is designated an area of special scientific interest because it includes patches of rarefied and much prized acid grassland. In early summer a litany of wildflowers drive up between the grasses: orchids, self-heal, meadowsweet, cow parsley, dock, nettle, greater plantain, creeping buttercup, harebells, knapweed, loosestrife, bird’s-foot trefoil and thistles, later to be joined by the marching blue of the devil’s bit scabious and the sulphur yellow of ragwort. Birds are attracted by this superabundance of wildflowers (the meadows in summer teem with them) and their seeds, a staple of their winter diets. The tramping of the bullocks let loose in autumn helps to re-sow the flower meadows, and the birds join in the effort of renewing it. Moles plough the ground (their mounds today dusted white), turning manure and seed under, ready for next summer. It is a habitat in perfect and rare balance with itself, supporting a vast array of invertebrates including moths, butterflies, grasshoppers and red soldier beetles — and these in their turn feed the birds.

I find the gateposts at the bottom of the lower meadow rimed with velvet ice that slicks the fingers with remembered cold. The moisture in the wood has been cooled and then frozen overnight, expanding out of the posts to create ice-prisms that glint-warp the light. Snow is scribbled untidily into the meadow dips and edges and the glare of reflected sunlight makes it hard at first to see the birds; it is easier like a spy to pick up their chatter. I collect birdcalls at random and try to detect which species I’m hearing. With diligent watching, I glimpse them on the wing: blackbirds, red-bibbed robins, sparrows and tits flit deftly in between the steel stems of the brambles with busyness and purpose. The bones of the trees and shrubs are exposed with the fall and decay of leaves, freeing up uninterrupted sightlines with which to observe bird flights.

In the middle-storey branches, wood pigeons are making clumsy landings and unceremoniously inserting themselves on an already crowded perch, no matter whether their fellows are shoved off or not. Rose-breasted nuthatches drilling their beaks into low-slung branches add a different layer of sound, and in the foreground tiny clutches of goldcrests hop from grass to scabious stalks in dainty whorls of flight. There is such a rising chorus of bird calls that it’s as though a great drama is taking place at the avian level, from which I am excluded. Perhaps this has always been going on just fifteen minutes from my doorstep and I am only now tuning in to it. Still higher above, the sun catches at the white wings of common gulls, wheeling in a loose pack, keeping a weather eye on the lie of the land below for any choice scraps. Tens of thousands of feathers shutter and bar the light over me.

The black shadows which I hardly notice at first, so ubiquitous hereabouts, are the crows, corvus corone — the birds everyone thinks they know and which Chaucer dubbed the ‘jangling’ bird of woe. These are the ones I’ve particularly come to study, learn and glean the habits of. Crows on the top-loftiest perches of the meadows’ birches and oaks, sitting singly, lonely, on improbably slender branches. Crows on the ground carrying out forensic searches with their plague-doctor beaks, turning over the snow for any signs of life: a dusting of white on the black lacquer of their bills and the sheen of their feathers. Crows stooping in the sky crying their guttural, malcontent rawks. Close to, the power in that 45cm wingspan is raptor-like and I am captive to its flight.

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I became intrigued by crows a couple of months ago when one appeared from its perch at sunset and commenced an exhibitionist rawk! rawk! rawk! interspersed with loud mechanical clicks of its beak, producing a sound like two halves of a coconut shell being snapped together. It was utterly mesmerising and confounding to watch, the crow often seeming to pick the elevated platform of a rock or bench from which to declaim. Though I had not witnessed this call before, it seemed to be an end-of-day ritual, carried out with the nonchalance of routine, like brushing teeth.

Today the crows are so assiduous in their uniform searches among the snow-stiffened grasses you’d think a murder had been discovered – and in a way it has for that is the collective noun for crows: a murder of them. Yet, bent in scimitar curves, beaks to the earth, displaying their elegant feather pantaloons, they amuse rather than threaten. One – a jester – puffs up its feathers and hops crab-wise, looking in my direction with an oblique, obsidian eye. It dances over the snow and when I look away at one of its companions starts up a petulant karr! keearr! to draw me in again to its antics.

Two hours of counting crows and the light is beginning to fade. Oak branches with gluts of them in their weave stretch into a snow sky, pink and buttery at the horizon line leaching into cool blue. The air is desolate with cold. The crows swoop against it like bits of cloth caught on the up-rise, to eventually land and re-commence their calling. I spy a second magpie and my thought follows the nursery rhyme: two for joy. All the promise of spring lies under the snow, under the crows, in the cold hard ground.

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Memory Lane: Part Two

Posted on Nov 5, 2017Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

… It is not clear why a permit used to be required to pass through these woods, but I suspect it has something to do with the state in which the land had been left (especially the exposed and treacherous cellars of the house) after the demolition gangs had done their work in the 1960s. I make a polite farewell to my well-met stranger and approach the gate into the woods. As I step from Higher Coach Road into its sequel, I am conscious that I am walking down her memory lane and at the same time forging my own. It is an odd sensation.

As I start along the path through the wood I have a strong sense of having just crossed a threshhold and – like Lucy Pevensey looking back towards the Wardrobe – I cannot help but look back down the road, my eye telescoping to its presumed, unfocused end. The mist still idles in the hollow places and everything I see is revealed by slow degrees at the whim of the path and the weather. Beside me, South Lodge with its intricate but softened gable ends – portents of what once might be expected of Milner Field House – has clearly seen better days. New windows have taken the place of the old sashes which lie stacked, smashed, their frames rotten, a stone’s throw away. A playground for invertebrates and other woodland creatures. The shed is webbed over and its locks and hinges rusted shut. Already I am aware of decay and of the wood’s reclamation of this strip of land. I pass by quickly, wary of watchers in the Lodge who may be suspicious of my curiosity.

The start of the path through the woods is densely over-canopied, with branches forming a low rough vault over the way and holly (a favourite plant of the Salt family) hemming me in on either side, appearing oddly overdressed in its solid waxy green beside the slapdash nudity of the other trees. Over-braced by the flying buttresses of beech and horse chestnut, I am as secluded as one is ever likely to feel on a path and, funnelled through the wood, driven through to its secret hiding-places, am quickly lost to the wider world. A magpie twirls out from a tree in search of treasures, its wings a pied fan opening, and it is my turn to start, my heart pumping fear in my chest. The walking is not unpleasant, but it is tomb-stone quiet, and perhaps because of the stranger’s equivocation over access, there is a feeling of pacing through someone else’s privacy here, the leaves underfoot confirming the impression with their unmistakable shushing. I feel at once tucked away from the world and a keen sense of – not going back in time exactly – but a conspicuous awareness that the wood is keeping mum about the abandoned remains at its heart. Its secrets will perhaps not so easily be given up.

The trees that line the way show no signs of being managed, having seeded themselves at will, over stones and on top of one another, and encroaching on the path. There are multi-stemmed trees here as are more commonly found in a hazel coppice, except these are untended and their trunks sprout unchecked and unharvested. Gossamer strands spun out optimistically onto the breeze by orb weavers and other spiders which love the nooks of the cross-stitch trunkery catch unexpectedly, unwelcome, across my cheeks. Little snares, warnings perhaps. I am put strongly in mind of Kipling’s poem The Way Through the Woods and my steps begin to pace out its rhythms: “They shut the road through the woods/ Seventy years ago./ Weather and rain have undone it again,/ And now you would never know/ There was once a road through the woods/ Before they planted the trees.” When the road was in use by the Salts, it was open and there were certainly fewer trees. These are mostly incomers after the fact, like me, and that’s reassuring. Back in the day, the road was lined on either side with fashionable rhododendron bushes, many of which remain like clues, though most without tending have grown leggy and wilded themselves to the wood, making way for trees and sometimes stooping under them. The clumsy fall of my foot snapping a twig is as vital a crack in the stillness as the report of a gun and a jay leaps into flight, its chinoiserie plumage painting the sky.

The breeze is communicated up the canopy of the trees in whispers behind me, getting nearer and nearer: leaves catch the trembling flit of it from their neighbours and together they are made one seething organism, moving up the path behind and then overtaking me. Occasionally a following tread sounds on the path and I am backward-glancing and self-admonishing at the ghost of fear that spikes into me. There’s no one behind of course – probably a conker from a horse chestnut, though it’s late in the season for their fall. I stand for some time transfixed with my gaze directed backwards down the path, convinced I will see my mystery walker solidify from phantom to pedestrian reality if I look long enough. Nothing. And yet the treads had fallen with pronounced and unmistakable walking accents behind me. But I am alone on the path, in the wood, in the past.

When I reach the cross roads in the wood, I am assailed by a strong sense of deja vu; I’ve been here before. In the spring, whilst searching out the local flora I stumbled upon a public footpath called Sparable Lane (a corruption of Sparrow’s Bill) bounded on each side by dry stone walls. Looking across the clearing now, I make out the sloping of that other path and realise in a sudden moment of spooked uncanniness that I am indeed walking my own memory lane.

Though access is not legislated nor official through the wood, the fact that the path remains clear and easy to traverse (I can see that branches that would have struck across the way have been cut cleanly back) speaks of the local will to keep it open. This is a path informally maintained by common (if somewhat illicit) consent. Though presently alone in the woods, I see evidence of human activity here and there: empty beer cans and crisp packets, but also elective desire paths through the ground ivy, which I assume dog-walkers have made in their journeys through the wood.

I take the path to the left, accompanied by the ticklish sound of water running in little draining ditches at its sides, and ascend to where I know the house was situated. Even though I’m climbing up, it somehow feels like going down – like Orpheus going down into Hades. An old fir throws out a bough to mark where to turn aside for the area I believe the house to have occupied, and I feel a moment’s guilt at the discrepancy between Orpheus’s rescue mission and my own morbid quest to pick over old bones. I ignore the feeling, weaving a way between fallen trees until I see the first of the sizeable and haphazardly cast aside masonry pieces. They are wrapped lushly in blankets of moss and appear unmoved from where first they fell when discarded by the demolition gangs. As my eye deciphers the undulating mounds of greenery and stone, I begin to see pile upon pile of building materials, careless cast-offs like scattered thoughts that once made a house. Weather and rain have undone it again – or in this case the sledge hammers of demolition gangs who perhaps put more store in bricks and stone than in tales of terror and hauntings and shook their heads over such a waste. I walk gingerly between open tunnels and access hatches into the original cellars, testing the load-bearing capacity of patches of ground doubtfully with my toes.

My tip-toe exploration turns up salt-glazed bricks which were supplied by Joseph Cliff & Sons of Leeds, window glass and giant hefts of stone quarried from the top of the hill I passed on my way through the wood. Local materials and trades for a local house – a respectful approach from an incomer. Curiously I feel my own incomer status here even more keenly, looking at the wreckage of another’s dreams strewn at my feet.

Close-covering ivy and bursts of lush frilling tongue ferns clamber the ruins, redacting stone and brick so that the sense one might have been able to make of the building’s vocabulary – there a coping stone, there a window lintel – is all but lost. These plants are some of the typical ‘reclaimers’ when a once-developed area is left abandoned for any length of time. With the industry of soldiers, they move in and efficiently revert the land, steadily editing out all traces of cultivation and habitation. I find it difficult to overlay this chaotic and shambolic scene with the palimpsest of the Milner Field House which I hold in my mind’s eye, an image in which the house stands self-importantly in a desert of lawn and gardens. Few trees at all. This wood can be no more than sixty or perhaps seventy years old then: a comparatively young wood, surging into being through its own will and the simple neglect of the land. Here too there survive great bushes of the original rhododendrons, and I make a promise to myself to return the next spring to see them in bloom.

There’s one final sight I want to find – the wood’s incongruous mosaiced floor, along from the rubble heaps, and following the lines of where the winter garden used to stand. A soiled and leafed-over dance floor it seems in the middle of the wood, nothing could be stranger. It is the floor of the glass conservatory which housed all manner of exotic plants when owned by the Salts – perhaps to the delight of the visiting Prince and Princess of Wales. Now a muddy floor which leaves skip over. I push the toe of my shoe into its soil dermis and fresh, new-babe pink peeps out at me, and in other parts the original mosaic patterns can still be seen. Too difficult and too costly for the demolition gang to break up and remove, so here it lies still, creating its own little clearing, a landmark and fixture of the wood. Squirrels, foxes, shrews and hedgehogs perhaps navigate by it, their trails making room for it, crossing and re-crossing it, scenting it with scat: a posh woodland toilette. A happy thought.

A light rain starts up making me turn my steps homeward, flushing me out of the wood and out of the past. It is an odd parting: me full with the remnant history of this place; the “undone” house silent but eloquent. As I move gradually further out of the wood, leaving the remains of the house feels a little like coming up for air. With Higher Coach Road in sight, it is tempting, like Orpheus, to look behind to check that the path through the wood is still there; that I didn’t dream the house, the rubble, the mosaic floor in the guardedly slumbrous wood.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.

Rudyard Kipling, The Way Through the Woods

No, there is no longer a road through the woods, just a path that we keep open.

A walk into wet

Posted on Jun 7, 2017Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

I have been two days inside like Jeremy Fisher at the back door watching the pelting rain come down in slaps onto the mossy tarmac of my back yard. Throughout this plashing, there’s been a magpie haunting the eaves and chimney of the house with an ungodly squawking. I would say it is the rain has made it drowned-feathered and cross, but the magpie twitters even in the tentative truces between the rains. I wonder if it has a nest nearby it’s worrying over. Then, superstitiously, I think on a heartbeat, one for sorrow. Perhaps it is old Maggie – or my superstition – impels me to venture out today in spite of the weather. There is an uneasiness and all-thumbsiness to my preparations as though the spirit were willing but the flesh… I secure myself inside my rain coat (an improbable yellow) and shore up the feet in wellies, determined that the rain is not going to get a foothold. I will bring brightness with me today, I think with a touch of hubris, amidst all this dulled grey.

My rain coat is waxed so that the hood, when up, is like the skin of a drum and magnifies all noise in a little bubble about my head. This is a risky business near cycle lanes and traffic but, like an owl, I will be swivel-headed watching for anything coming. The thick drops dive-bomb me as soon as I close my front door, smacking the drum, and I body forth in hunkering strides with a grim and wholly sham defiance. Beat, beat, beat. Puddle-wonderful comes to me out of nowhere, an echo of E.E. Cummings. Humph! I make my position clear in my hunched shoulders like hardened soldiers: I am here under sufferance and because the magpie is a loud complainer.

The wind has worked itself up overnight from the west and the first part of my walk faces it head on. It shoves at me with unfriendly imperatives: be on your way! So that I have to tuck myself into it as it whips the air out of my lungs. Langstrothdale was the last place I walked in wind such as this, except that was in January in freezing weather and my brain didn’t even work then, just seized in icy surrender. Even the teeth feel that biting a cold. I should be grateful today then, but there is breath-stealing effort in this kind of walking and I find it hard to concentrate on much at first save putting one foot in front of the other; in front of the weather, as it strips through the glen. Nature’s joys are a little harder sought on a day like this; a turning day – a between-the-acts day – a spring-cleaning day when the season spills and washes itself,* tramps down and glosses its spent early signals underfoot. Sluicing everything to shiny newness. The wind beats the bounds and flushes out anything weak, spent, dead or dying. As I press on, the wild garlic is a yellowing untidiness about me, the rain releasing the last little ghost of its flavour. And in spite of my efforts I am soon washed too, ruddy and glow-faced with draggled ends of sleeves; glasses made prisms hard to see out of. Myopic mole. I tell myself that this wind, cold off the Atlantic, is a hopeful harbinger that carries the first promise of summer in its blasting breath. Hmmm. It’s a while before the buoyancy in this kind of thinking takes.

Still, I look for the seeds on everything: little universes waiting to burst their lives next year in quiet splendour. They do not mind if no one is watching; don’t mind bending a little under rain; just doing what they’ve always done. Grasses like weather-vanes beside the way bow beneath the wracking winds, frantically pressed together in creaking conference. They remind me of that bit in Vaughan Williams’s Greensleeves when the violins chase each other through grassy meadows. Or so it seems to me. Spring is turning into something else before my eyes. There’s been a curtain call and I wonder if I’m meant to see this bit. On the nap of the wind is a forethought of summer, soon here to throw up new things amidst the detritus which is already turning back into the ground. Buttercups – cups o’ joy I call them – bridge the gap and are grown top-lofty and scraggly in the meadows. They’ve got some ambition in them to grow so high, but the rain teaches them a humble lesson.

(Some titbits I collected from the path on my walk)

I am all out of kilter today, at odds without knowing why, and I feel petty and churlish as I pass by dervishes of buffeted elderflowers, saucers of cream balanced against the wind. To stick a nose into one is to try to catch its secret, except that you can’t. No attempt at enfleurage could recreate just that smell of rain-washed freshness. Underfoot lie the wind’s casualties: sycamore wings, oak apples, confetti of blossom. Tiny pine cones snap and groan against the boot. All this banquet brings the birds out into the path with tilted heads as if to say, perhaps a caterpillar or other juicy morsel has fallen. Blackbird, crow – a sparrow no bigger than a fistful of feathers. And on the playing fields beside the river, sharp-tipped swallows broadcasting and scooping the air as if they would catch the rain in big-bellied nets. A mesmerising layering of flights against the heavy grey. These are not bothered by weathers. Driving forward into the wind, I am almost oblivious to snail matings down on the ground: the two here are busy about their business, fuse-clamped together (again in spite of the weather).

Why, then, do I contend today with the weather? Ornery and morose. The willow wands in the water let loose their streams of leaves – why don’t I, like them, let myself be borne on? The rain has coursed the path with sand-flushed rivulets until it becomes a flowing tributary beside the river. Sucking my boots under. It’s true what some people say, that the path has muscles of its own; it’s honing them on me as I try to keep some kind of firm ground under me. I am planted into the path at intervals only to have to labour out of puddles dishonest about their depths. Yes, walking is striving today.

Still there is a pleasure in being out under this heavy soak. Mouth full of the smell of soil and soft mulch under trees; leaves waxed in watery deep greens, reflective as glass. Clover, and something other I don’t have a name for, have crept out beside the bank. I don’t know many names for the flora and fauna I see and I walk onwards groping at the kinds of names they might be. Pink gossiper, lifted lips, gossamer glory. Fancies. Beside them, the water takes the image of the rain like a negative, reacting in bubbled dips to its pelting, throwing out rounds of ripples. I wonder what it sounds like to a fish? Is that a stupid question? It seems to move in harder and harsher clouds for a while and I am bent-backed with it – surrendered at last. And on the bank a wagtail is sitting, like its name, in perpetual motion, just watching out of a little dark eye.

Loosening a little, the wind lightens on my return and the rain shakes off some of its emphasis. Now just chatter in the background, the kind you encounter from an unexpected acquaintance at the supermarket, slowly but surely settling into their patter. I mind it less now, this hum-drum clatter, my feet slurping into puddles I had groused at on setting out, stirring up the silty bottoms of them with a – perhaps – gleefulness. Now I make my peace. Palms outward to Old Mother Goose, hissing her sharp-tongued warning at me in protection of her littl’uns; I’ve heard all your bluster before, mother, I won’t harm you. And, wetly, I turn back up the hill.

I arrive home sodden, fresh-faced, buoyed and better for having had the breath knocked out of me. And for having been distilled a little in elder blossom.

*I have, with a little licence as to season, used an image from Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring here, taken from Tom Bombadil’s explanation to the hobbits after a wet day in the Old Forest, “This is Goldberry’s washing day…and her autumn cleaning.”

Looking for stag beetles I found instead…

Posted on Jun 4, 2017Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

Shipley glen is shrouded in mist as I make my start, for last night’s rains are already burning off under a sun beating to get through the lingering cloud. It could go either way, I think, but cavalierly shuck the idea of a rain coat like a too-cautious skin. Anyway, I’m aiming for cover: for nature’s putting-away and hiding place, the woods. The leaves will umbrella me if needed. I am all eyes down, for I have about me an express purpose today: today I will search out the liquorice-lacquered stag beetle – Scarabaeoidea – and like a child I of course hope to find the male of the species with its cumbersome and fearsome looking antlers. Pincers I’d always thought them; nippers; doers of harm and my soft brain had counselled caution. Not to go near, not to like, not to find it beautiful to carry your weapon of defence so outward and obvious. All its perfections on its head. Once, I had seen one outside my first remembered home traffic with a spider. And lose. It was dragged down a sewer cover in the end to an undisclosed but entirely known fate. I must have been little for all my memory is very close to the ground of that little battle.

No remarker of hawthorn blossom today I – and just as well for it’s nearly all over now; no noticer of the almost-adult goslings on their glides. The canal a brown be-petaled stillness beside me. Too open to the sky and moving feet, bike tyre and push-chair wheel here. But still I am studious at the sides of the path looking for its jet-black armour. It’s a kind of discipline, to hold the image in the mind’s eye – a glint of black making ponderous passage through last year’s leaves – and hope that by omnipotence of thought you’ll somehow conjure it to shuffling life. Any black thing is a tantalising promise for just a second until the eye discovers it as something else. More often than not the intrusions are dog litter, careless cast-offs by the way. There’s a claustrophobia in looking down into undergrowth so long and I want to turn up the face, stretch the back, and see the birds who are trilling their songs, but as I said this is a discipline and just my luck if I looked up and lost the sight of this click-carapaced wanderer. It’s a slow kind of walking that’s required in swervy zigs and zags. Were I a snail, I’d have limed the path in silver traces back and forth by now. But I don’t really expect him to show himself here: I’m waiting on Hirst Wood for my prize viewing.

There’s a close relief as I get under the canopy of the first few trees and breathe deep the mulchy, pulpy air. It’s thick and heavy under here: humid invisible presences like walls you walk through under the densest of the trees. The wood trying to air itself after the rain. And I should have thought about the mud as my impractical shoes sink and grapple. I tussle with a problem here which I had not thought to have – there is leaf mould in every direction of course so where best to look for the bashful beetles? There’s a loggery up ahead. That might yield something. But I look into all nature’s hidey-holes along the way, just in case, for these are the refuges I know will keep them: close, pent, safe for a secret mating. Into bored out tree trunks – made shells of their former selves by wood worm; under logs wet with last night’s rain. And all the while a chorus of loud dripping going on about me as the leaves shed the last drops of wet in heavy globes. At the stands of nettles and brambles I am defeated – beware all ye who enter here. A spiteful thought: that will of course be where they are hiding.

At the loggery I turn up the usual suspects under the smallest logs: woodlice almost made primordial in their see-through armour that the dark has not trained to colour; some worms wriggle about; and no doubt smaller things than I can see. I stand up and still disappointment takes me for a moment – and then in the periphery of my eye, a rustle of leaves. I look down in almost-welling hope and there’s a flash of grey-brown soft down. No stag beetle but something else. Tiny, delicate, pointy-nosed little fidgeter dives out from under the log to pull at leaves. Like a mouse, but not. The name won’t come, but I’m struck by an almost-recognition on the tip of the memory – something moley, casting me back to a Wind in the Willows or Farthing Wood childhood parody. That sooty brown coat, that whiskered sharp nose, the hiding eyes. Two of them now! I am so still beside the fallen tree limbs and other ‘whack’ that they’re safe enough to venture a sniff from out beneath the log and tease leaves back under with them. One look is to imagine one in my palm: its lightness, its smooth fur, the tiny bones, absorbing all the world – food, mate, danger – through its uplifted tapering snout.

It was, I later learned, a common shrew: sorex araneus. A whole realm of signification haunts this innocent snuffler. Wayward women we are told need taming: wives who berate, scold and prate at husbands worn down into the ground by it. How did you, little burrower, get weighed down by all this angst? Is it the pointy nose that struck a chord? Looking as though it would be in at everyone’s business: poking, prodding; nagging, attacking. But all I see is a dainty little rummager. Furtive flashes from the safety of the logs into the cool leaf mould show you to be indifferent to human mythologies. I stand and observe you in petrified stillness for a while lest I disturb. Then – nothing. You’ve hunkered down in your lair, I assume, but I still linger as if my reverent quiet will bring you out again. But no, no more. Don’t be greedy.

‘Beshrew me’ uttered in the antique sense was to call a curse down on oneself. But I felt the opposite on this day where I went out to see stag beetles and instead caught darting glimpses of shrews. Like so many of life’s adventures, misbegun; but in the slick-treed wood, errant hope got this exchange.

Welcoming in a Spring

Posted on Jun 2, 2017Aug 6, 2021 by kylienorman

The day would be good for walking I decide and once decided it becomes – for me at least – a single pressing thought, almost as though it had a life of its own: like a spell or an almost child tugging on your arm and dragging you towards the front door. Itchy soles of feet; palms waiting to clutch at the outdoors air; heart full as an egg to see all nature’s sudden surprises. When this mood is upon me, I am restless to anything else and the walk needles itself into my consciousness with the insistent question when, when, when? Nothing worse than to ignore the call; depression and doldrums the penalty. When walk calls, the feet must fall in. I am learning it is something to protect from the tyrannies of household chores and work. I curate my walks now: make a little space for one every week, bottle them up like scent, and stow the little treasures away to sometimes take out, carefully handle and fix in the memory.

Today the sun has got itself up pretty well into the bluest of skies and there’s a warm thickness to the air that promises dry ground underfoot and a slow sluggish canal or river to walk by. I am elated stepping out of my front door, padding along the neat little same-and-yet-not-same Saltaire streets, with a fondness for everyone whom I pass because we are all complicit in this wonderful warm May day together – in the determination to be out of doors and to soak sun into skin. And yet I do not know exactly which path I will take – canal to Hirst Wood, the Nook Lane to Nowhere, or the river path? I let my booted feet decide as they trip along by the canal, wafting and wefting and warping the path’s dust about me like a chalky cover-all. I know each path a little more with each week – the goodies to look out for: the hawthorn in prickly blossom; the fluff-feathered goslings; the sweeps of bluebells. All lie before me, known stops along the way, and my feet go with the slow haste of anticipated joy and savouring delay.

I retrace a bit – why not? The stone squeeze by the canal where you go down to the river path almost makes it seem a secret. You slip off into it as if the very first to make this delicious discovery. The stones lip my boots as I go, jostle my steps as they pebble the path, and over all the thrushes, blackbirds and crows fly and dip their shrewd wings like greetings. Thin nasal siren of a bee alarms for just a moment as it brushes past and is quickly gone upstream. Over the bridge, over the river, a flicker of dapple tricks down through the branches from the sky and dances over the path to web the way with white. This – as I expand my lungs to take in the arid, laden air – this! is nature’s way to welcome in a spring.

Round the corner and out of nowhere the downy globes of dandelion heads emerge to bob and nod – a clutch of waiting wishes to bless you on your way. The ground dips down and rushes me on till, level with the river, feet plant into grassy banks to muse at the overgrown round tower of the derelicted bridge. Through the field brighter than the brightest green quilt, I come to its edge and seam where bees are at work shuttling in and out of one another’s way in a strange furious dance and play. A gurgle of stream is crossed, its rocky bed water-slaked and mossed. Down by the boat club where swallows dip and follow, another stream. Temptation to bathe hot swollen feet, but I retreat with the coward thought, someone might appear!

Whoever knows what makes us look up to see the secret thing so many others miss? Today’s was this: a heron across the way, stealthy silent stalker in the river’s languid pull; strange snaking neck and big gawky wings. All the herons I have never seen were because I was not watching, but now my attentiveness connives to bring you to life, careful flutterer, weaving in between the weeds. I wonder about your steady step as you reveal your grey again. This is a slow dance to draw a minnow out. I would not disturb your subtlety for all the world. Sudden as an arrow or the end of a song, you’re gone. The mallards with their young are busy on their glides and do not mind the dark tickle of baby minnows under-web whose embryonic selves, flickering almost by accident with the current, gather in dense translucencies: something the river keeps but cannot hold for long. A robin a flash of red song on a lichen-laced branch, no sooner spied than it flies.

I clamber up the ridge under a parasol of sun-blasted green and the tree branches dip low in spite of me. Whitened and jewel-like in the sun, clouds of flies startle as I push on – you see them hanging over the river; great shifting billows preside there and trap the light. Sharp shaft of wild garlic up the nose calls the gaze downward to a maze of white constellated stars. Beside me I pass trees sleeved with ivy until they are covered with it: trefoil leaves close as clothes. The bluebells up the bank – straight purple blazons – sing out their short lives as they renew and rejuvenate the woods. And I burst with it too – my whole being alive with this becoming, this husk-splitting on-rush of life.

At last I am but a willing receptacle for precious impressions: a pigeon as heavy and cumbersome in flight as its image to get down. The lace of the cow-parsley heads – finer than a bride’s veil – looking sugar-spun and gorgeous to taste. A duck landing mid-river with a skirmish of feathers. Smooth and silky in the sun, iridescency of mallard’s crown. And as my steps turn homeward, its rasp-throated call.