The wind was beckoning me earlier this week. I’d already taken a walk around the village (accompanied by the cat) and collected a parcel from the post office.
I savoured all those usual signs of spring’s arrival: daffodils dancing, flowering currant and forsythia in bloom, birds busily building nests. I wandered through both graveyards - the old, with its ruins of the original church, and the new, where Sylvia Plath lies - and it was all very cheering and lovely.
But a windy day always stirs something in me: an urge to head for the moors, high above the valley floor. So back out I went, this time with secateurs for pussy willow (they’ve been pruning the trees and there are plenty of still-living stems on the sawn boughs).
I could see across to Lumb Bank, the country house once owned by Ted Hughes, and the road to villages even further and higher than ours.
It was invigorating and blustery, with rain in the air and the sharp wind whipping my hair across my face. Instinct kept me from stepping too close to the edge of the footpath; huge slabs of rock mark a sudden drop into the steep and deadly precipice (part of which is named ‘Hell Hole’).
Despite the village gardens and window boxes splashily heralding the new season, spring seems to be delayed here on the wilder fringes. The heather’s still clinging on to last year’s flowers, bleached to shades of vellum and bone. The bracken - that which hasn’t disappeared back into the earth - is rust-coloured and brittle. The only trees in leaf are the weather-stunted oaks, and their leaves, brown and faded, belong to last year.
You’d be pressed to immediately know what time of year it is up there on the edge of the moors. Perhaps late autumn, maybe early spring… or somewhere in between.
But there are signs. The bright rosettes of foxgloves promise purple rockets in the summer. Elders are putting out pink, crinkled baby leaves.
September has always been My Time: for new beginnings, changes in direction. My life has - for the most part - been intertwined with the world of education, and I tend to align my activities with the academic year.
Yet right now, I’m venturing out into pastures new. Photography, writing, collaborations. It feels right. The days are lengthening, nature is reawakening and there’s a sense of positivity and possibility in the air. Life - at least, my creative life - is a blank notebook waiting to be written and sketched in. I plan to fill each page (complete with the odd scribble and crossing-out, for which I intend to be completely unapologetic).