28 11 07

I seem to inhabit time backwards these quick days; a regression into memory. As a child, I heard of Eskimoes having hundreds of words for snow. Now I know that Franz Boas the anthropologist recorded just four: to mean lying snow, falling snow, drifting snow & snow drift. This, in just one language of the many of the people I now know as Inuit. Maybe there are many more Boas was not told. Here, there’s rain. It’s falling straight down & is constant. This morning’s Shipping Forecast gave six options for rain around the country: occasional rain, rain then showers, rain or showers, continuous moderate rain, slight drizzle & rain, & finally, occasional rain or drizzle. Before going out, I try to decide which I’m seeing through the kitchen window. It must be continuous moderate rain. Fliuch; wet then, in Gaelic. There’s no wind. Our words in English for rain – drizzle, showers, heavy rain, squalls, pour into my mind as the moderate rain falls on my green knitted hat.

One of this year’s piebald lambs – a cross of a blackface tup with a Hebridean ewe – with one and a half thin horns, nuzzles the hens where they disconsolately scratch the sogged turf. Up the hill water abandons its usual courses across & through thin soil, & being pragmatic, takes to the roads to follow its way to the bay. Which might be fresh rather than salt in all this rain. Fresh now, as though it’s the first time I’ve seen this (though in truth it’s an abiding memory from I don’t know when), on every hard rush blade, at the junction of each now-dead flowerhead & stem, drops of water catch my eye, rinse my sight.

At the point that looks out to the Atlantic, the morning’s heron voices her displeasure at my appearance & cracks long wings over to the island, to the looping, lingering call of her always companion, the curlew.

As the short day eases into dusk, the rain clears & a dilute sun sets a little west of the Tor of Beeches, its off-vermilion blush momentarily lending the hills a purple light among clinging clouds; as though the heather was again flowering as it did in summer. As the small stems of stork’s bill, Erodium cicutarium, flower unseen & unseasonal, by the sea’s edge right here, right now.