Finally I'm back on the meadow as I know it intimately. A breeze pushes short waves across the swell and the light, dispersed by a sky in shades of grey, adds shadows jumping in jagged contours. On the meadow scarlet pimpernels like friendly trickles of blood pop up in my unsuspecting eyes. A flight of starlings like a flying blanket whooshes by and lands chattering on washed up, dried out seaweed. I'm truly home again.
When I returned by way of 'Funny Lane' there was a drizzle while I drove through a gauntlet of screeching blackberry branches. Nevertheless they never have left any worse damage on the lacquer since 2003, other than the scratches they made in the dirt that settles on it. And suddenly it came to me. What I had always experienced as a menace by the similarity in sound of a bad teacher screeching his chalk on a blackboard was in fact a natural brush-up. In this way the sea salt that lavishly sprays the van on so many windy days was thoroughly scrubbed off, maintaining the van in mint condition.
The plumes of flaxen grass grown green again bend off the wind as if seeking shelter in a reverence reversed. Even my turf, ridden and trampled, sprouts grass so high it wets my ankles when it has rained. The sorrels that flagged my kitchen alley before are rusting stiff in colours deep as corton steel. The others, that hung over to annoyingly soak my pants to above the knee and that I strapped out of my way with sticky clingweed, have now been triumphed over by bindweed, proudly heralding its coup with snow-white corollas. And along the east wall the sunburnt leaf tips of montbretias only boast one flower yet.
The eyebright extracted by root, so massively clustered along the path that runs by Lackanishka, which I planted upon my kitchen roof in a cloudburst of optimism, must have been shaved by the wind. The knotgrass has sneaked up to a boulder and flatly stalks its claim. And from grykes overlapping the rocks is umbelliferous anonymous hazardous, aka slippery when trodden.
Dusty responded to Silke’s Tibetan bell, which is traditionally jingled by pregnant mothers for their yet unborn babies, by positioning herself sideways with her belly close to the ringing.
Circumstantial evidence ever more suggests the probability of Dusty's pregnancy. Several times she has pushed people out of the water and she has punched a few with her snout on the breastbone. This indicates territorial behaviour and she does this without immediate cause.
Might you, regardless, still want to go in, at least keep to the shallows. There she has to manoeuvre more cautiously and has room to swim away. Don't crash the forthcoming birthday party.