April

Shadow spring. The briefest of reprieves between the storms. Late birdsong lifts the valley out of its most recent squall and the spent rainclouds lie languorous and grey over the opposite hillside. The sky is rooted to the ground.

Spring of broken waters, blood. With dogged hope we’ve both watched birth and death. We’ve sown seed, the storms of our own winter claustrophobia still threatening; seen the seedlings shoot while our horizons remain unclear.

We’ve passed milestones; five years of unsustainable effort towards sustainable living and we have finally secured the fencelines of a second field; the goats run free all year. They choose from tree tips. They taste the buds of our unwilling April leaves. Brought back to the house in a measure against the dangers of sudden gluttony, Thorne licks my face for minutes in her thanks.

Three lambs, three kids. Most farmers here will birth 800. Last year our neighbour was forced to intubate every lamb. How should we live, a friend asks, to chase the dream of sustainability?

I wonder how many people those 800 lambs will feed.

There is only one way to chase the dream. It is hard and beautiful and full of hurt and takes more than any one person has inside them.

We finish the new potato enclosure, its long lines cutting clean unbroken soil like guilt, measured, meted. In the rain, their green crowns sample life.

We fell larch for timber and winch it through the woodlands. ‘New tree! Make a New Hay House,’ I tell the Darlings, and they assure me that they’re well aware that it’s for them.

This is a letter of love and thanks to my paid subscribers. It’s so long now since I last wrote a full essay, the months overwhelming in between, that I am making this diary free. Sending it out from the rainswept hill. The new piece Fran and I are making will tell the stories of this year’s children, loved or lost, rejected, at ease in their flock and field or transplanted to a life of strange wonders and unlikely friendships. Our own human journey between these poles has broken all the ground we’ve crossed.

I walked recently, at dawn, the goats hungry and not yet given access to the New Yummy Field. In a morning without rain. It was silent while they grazed the wayside. I stood and looked down at a dandelion’s leaves, isolated by the frost, as the sun broke free into the valley below us. A momentary world of untouched ground.

This is a letter sent out between the spring storms – in communion – to tell you how that frost gave way to beaded gold across the slopes, while I just stood watching, every blade of grass a spire.

R xxx