The Life That is Waiting

"We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."  

(Joseph Campbell)

I bought these flowers last week from my favourite plant nursery, the Vale Stables in Meanwood. I discovered the nursery when I was going for a walk with two of my friends last year, along the ridge of woodland in between Meanwood and Woodhouse, heading towards Meanwood Park.
It's absolutely charming, like a nature trail where the specimens are for sale, with plants in teapots and boots and a chair made out of horseshoes. At the centre of it all the people who run the nursery sit round an outdoor stove hanging out and drinking tea. They also sell firewood, and I'm sure I remember there being chickens roaming around at one point. On one visit I saw a cat who was the *spitting image* of a cat I used to know. 

I've been talking about moving house for a while now, but I now have a house to move to and a date to move in. The new house is in Meanwood, a hop, skip and a jump away from the woods and the nursery, and it's ours from mid May.

We'll have a cellar to keep our wine in, and I'll finally have the attic bedroom I've been dreaming of since I left home nearly nine years ago. The two alcoves in the living room could have been made for my pair of 6ft bookcases. There's a lovely light bathroom I can grow houseplants in, which is something I've been longing for after living in a house with a bathroom with an extractor fan instead of a window for the last seven years.

But in order to move into this new house that is waiting, I have to leave behind my home of seven years. This house has seen me through so much, so many relationships have begun and ended whilst I've lived here, so many housemates have moved in and out.  The cliched "good times and bad" and the weight of everything I have lived through here is suddenly pressing heavily on my heart.

I have a month to work out how to give this part of my life the respectful goodbye it deserves, before moving on to the life that is waiting. I want to take it all with me, in case I leave the wrong things behind. I want to hold on to every last memory, everything every person ever said to me in this house, every regret and every celebration.
I've spent the past seven years building a shrine to the person I promised myself I would become but now I finally have a chance dismantle it, and build something new.

"Why not smile? You've been sad for a while."*

This morning I have been spring-cleaning my garden, making it tidy enough to invite friends round for homemade wine and fires in the chimnea, pruning shrubs to make way for the new spring growth, and having a rationalisation of my gardening equipment before I move. I have countless seed trays and pots, which seem to increase in number each year even though I use very few of them. I've also got a load of old tyres that I painted up in bright colours and then stacked up to grow potatoes and strawberries in, which are not very transportable once full of soil and plants, so I'm not going to take with me when I go.

I put a post on the classifieds site at work to see if anyone wanted my excess seed trays, pots and tyres, and a woman got in touch to say she would love to have them as her son wants to start growing vegetables. So I feel pretty happy about that, not only have I de-cluttered and made my garden more habitable, but a little boy can learn about growing vegetables!

Whilst emptying the compost out of the stacked up tyres, I discovered the very end of the yield of last year's homegrown potatoes - a variety called "smile"! They are so-called because of the little half moon markings (which you can see clearly in the photo on right hand potato) which look like a smile. There are just enough potatoes for making a portion of potato salad, one of my favourite things to make with little homegrown potatoes.

*The subject line of this post is taken from one of my favourite REM songs, "Why Not Smile", and if you have spotify, you can listen to it here: R.E.M. – Why Not Smile - Oxford American Version

Springtime is the Season

"The springtime is the season where everyone's a friend

Loneliness and desperation both come to an end

No matter how you've died through winter, in spring you're born again

Your life might not be going good but spring helps you to pretend."

(Of Montreal, Springtime is the Season)

Today is the first day of spring.

Mid week I concocted plans to make a banner with this quote on it, and suspend in in the park today. I found some old fabric I could use, but when I tried to start crafting I found the paint I was going to use had solidified, and it was raining, and I wasn't feeling particularly full of the joys of spring, so it didn't happen.

I sorted through my paint cupboard in the hope of finding something else I could use, but there was nothing that would be weather resistant. But this did mean I finally got round to sorting through my paint cupboard. Several tins that had completely dried up got thrown out, and there's a few more that I will hang on to just before I move, and if I still haven't used them I can send them to this ace local project called Seagulls which collects old paint to be redistributed amongst the community.

I also collected three more of those brewery crates (after persuading my sister to take a trip to the supermarket with me in her car, we stopped en-route). I now have them in red, blue, green and black! I realised the backyard I've been getting them from belongs not to a terraced house, but to a closed down off-license cornershop, which explains why the crates are there.

"Hope is the thing with feathers"

In an earlier post, I was lamenting the fact that I couldn't scan in an illustration of a blue tit from my favourite bird identification book, as I didn't have the right leads to make my scanner work. Well, two trips to PC World later (have mercy on my soul) and an hour long tech-support session with my brother over skype whilst we tried to download the correct driver, I now have a fully working scanner!

I love this book so much! I got it for 50p from one of the few charity shops that will still sell you worn out, written in books for under a pound, rather than brand new/barely read books for nearer a fiver. On the front page, it says "To Daniel, with love from Bristol Granny xxx" and the spine is coming off, but this only endears it to me further.

I was tidying up my utility room recently, and I came across a bird feeder and a large unopened bag of peanuts I bought in the winter. I decided that if I hadn't at least started the bag before I moved, they would have to be thrown away. So I filled up the bird feeder and hung it up from the porch in my back garden, easily accessible to the bird community, not so easy for my adorable cat to pounce.

And at the weekend I saw a blue tit feeding on the nuts! The glee, the excitement, the unadulterated pleasure that I felt! It was better than getting a parcel through the post, or getting a splinter out my hand. The once-full feeder is now only three quarters full, and I am so happy that I will be able to give the peanuts away one at a time to the birds, rather than keep them in a cupboard and ultimately throw them away.

The subject line of this post is taken from Emily Dickinson's poem "Hope"

Hope 
   

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Cheap UK Youth Hostel Offer running until the end of March.

Please forgive the fact that the subject of this post sounds like a spam email...

I'm going away this weekend, and staying in a YHA hostel, and through a clever bit of googling I discovered this offer they have on:
http://www.yha.org.uk/special-offers/995bed_sale-995Beds-gs1.aspx

You can get accommodation for £9.95/night at any YHA hostel in the UK as long as you book online and you don't have to be a YHA member to take advantage, as this includes temporary membership for the nights you stay there.

I just thought I would mention this in case any of you fancied getting away. Without this offer it would have cost me £17.95 a night, so it's worth knowing!

The Bird's Wedding Day*

This post comes a couple of days after Valentines Day, but I can confirm that the first bird I saw on Valentines Day this year was a blue tit (or rather, two of them). Tradition has it that an unmarried woman can gain a useful insight into the nature of her future husband from the first bird she sees on Valentines Day:

http://www.worcesternews.co.uk/news/5005749.Why_you_should_look_out_for_the_birdie_on_Valentine_s_Day/

I didn't write this post on Valentines Day as I had a particular picture of a blue tit that I wanted to scan in, from this picture book I have called "A Colour Guide to Familliar Garden and Field Birds, Eggs and Nests". The images are wonderful; a page for each bird, with the bird itself in colour and it's nest/habitat as a pen and ink drawing.

BUT my scanner is currently out of action. It appears that since I used it last, I had mislaid the power cable. So I went into town to buy a replacement cable, only to get home and realise I had also lost the cable that connects it to the USB port on my laptop... 

So instead, here is an equally lovely blue tit illustration that I came across recently:

 

This picture is from one of the cutest zines I have read in a while - "The Smell of The Wild" by Gareth Brooks. It's a collection of drawings and poems about the British Countryside. (Consider this a reproduction of part of the zine for review purposes, and check out more of his work at http://www.appallingnonsense.co.uk/!)

I have no plans to marry (in fact I would go as far as to say I plan not to get married), so it is of little practical use to know that my 'future husband' will apparently have money (due to the yellow on the blue tit's tummy)! 

But I do find it fascinating the way that people make up explanations for things that they can't understand, or link together two apparently unrelated occurances to give their lives more meaning. 

I remember when I was in school, whenever we saw an aeroplane trail in the sky, in meant someone was thinking of you, and moreover the number of trails equated to the hair colour of that person. Or when you ate an apple you would twist round the stalk until it came off, or pull petals off a flower until there were none left, repeating to yourself "he loves me, he loves me not"...

It's actually only in the past few years that I have managed to stop using the apple stalk method to gauge the level of interest from my crushes, in favour of more hands-on methods like just talking to them.

 
*Apparently Valentine's Day was called the Bird's Wedding Day long ago as it was believed that birds selected their mates and began to breed on February 14.

Regeneration

At a party this weekend, a friend was telling me about woodland management, which is something I knew nothing about. He was telling me there is more to it than simply cutting down trees. I'd always thought that our need for wood had to be an endless compromise, with the trees always losing; we've decided that whatever we need the wood for is more important than having a living, breathing tree, and that decision is final. I'd always thought that a tree grows, and gets cut down, and then that's it.

What I hadn't appreciated is that trees grow back. Even if you cut the tree down to a stump, almost to ground level, it will send out shoots that will grow into new trunks, and in the meantime the space you have made allows the light to get through to give everything else growing in the woodland a better chance to get big and strong.

This initially sounded like magic to me - self-regenerating trees - but the fact that all it takes for trees to do this (species permitting) is a little care and planning , that you can manage a woodland so that it can keep providing you with a source of wood but at the same time still be a functioning part of its ecosystem, that cutting down the tree to make something doesn't need to be the end, that if you treat it well the tree will keep providing for you and those who come after you, all this made me really excited. A woodland can be sustainable if we just allow it to be so.