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Each morning the little bell from the convent reminds me that there are regular intervals to life, measurable points: the Nuns with docile hearts coming to prayer or duty, while I lay here listening to the silver birch and rain hissing at one another.
Reflecting on why this punctuated time seems so relevant: in other years, I mark the time with rambles in the wild, noting the leaves first, then stems days later, buds and finally blooms rotating faces beneath the sun on her journey. Life’s ebb and flow, tells the time.
This year’s extraordinary experience of hiding from the outside world has resulted in my brain being in suspended animation. Are we not still in early Spring? In fact midsummer is only weeks away. I can’t bear that I have missed the lilac, still haven’t planted an orange blossom.
I saw not a single tadpole, & the tiny splinters that swim in shoals down at the forded part of the river where we like to swim on a hot day, have not been introduced to my toes, not once. The farmer has fenced off the ford in any case because too many careless visitors picnicked
and left behind their litter. This is where I made friend with the cow I call Peaches, who was so bold to breathe on the back of my neck and eat a peach from my palm. It is making my bones sob, being stuck in. And people ask if their incarceration is making their anxiety worse.
Can you imagine, this is how pets feel perhaps? Born to do certain things, to climb, burrow, nibble, flee danger, and we shut them in carefully designed prisons in order to be allowed free access to their affectionate natures and soft fur. It is unhealthy, the fettering of life.
Nevertheless, this invisible and dreadful threat that we are combatting by virtue of removing our availability to use as replication host, is still making eager supper of the nation, and so I will stay at home. Stay at home listening to the bells across the rooftops, until safe.
