Autumn's Fall

Holly Cottage roses

It's the last day of November. This is the day - for me - that hails the end of autumn and the true beginning of winter. And what a beautiful November it has been! We've been watching the leaves tumbling down from the high tops of the beech and oak trees that line the Charleville estate wall from the warmth of the Holly cottage kitchen. Some of those same leaves find themselves floating onto the Holly Cottage garden - leaf litter to add to the soil for next year's harvest. The few small tress that we have in the back garden - probably more like shrubs to tall people ;) - provide a hint of autumnal colour too but one more blast of wind next week and all the leaves will finally have tumbled down. And then the long wait begins, again...autumn falls as winter calls. We already had a taste of snow, but that's always lovely, for a day...especially against the backdrop of a red rose...

News here is pretty scant. It's sleep, walk, feed baby, change baby, walk baby (and dog), and then do that all over again and then finally get some downtime once herself conks out for the night - usually around 9:15-9:20pm most evenings. How does she know that it's the same time every night? Baffling really.

Holly on her leafy way

The walking is good - beautiful even. Some days I find myself walking over the fields and wishing that 'it" would never end. 'It' = this time, this phase, this life - you get the message. And the days are so dry  that we get out and into the woods with barely a splash of mud on our leaf kicking boots. The leaves are piled high and Holly is chest deep - she's having great craic altogether sliding around and sprinting up and down the leafy paths. The pictures really don't do her wild spirit justice to be fair - she is a canine force to be reckoned with, especially on the sprinting u-turns. Apart from our usual woodland Charleville haunt, we've made it as far as Dublin's inner city (in a car mind), Belvedere House outside Mullingar and a short stroll about Middleton in Cork - showing herself off to the gran-aunts and cousins. We find different views everyday, different ideas, different perspectives. At this point we're up on 64/1000 miles...what adventures yet to come?

It's been extremely quiet on the garden front and for the first time in two months I made it out for a (blissful) hour yesterday while herself was carried away and comforted by the lull of the car's engine. Jobs done included - pulling dead leaves off cabbages and sprout plants; turning compost; pruning apple and roses back; pulling up sunflower plants (seeds good for the birds); cutting back last of the pepper plants and a an overall general tidy up and sweep. There's still a lot of food out there, and an equal lot in the freezer. The frozen tomatoes are a gift - add garlic, onion, fennel seeds, chilli and a couple of carrots and a delicious soupy treat is at your fingertips.

The other development here is that we've been baking our own brown soda-bread - no more shop bought convenience stuff. It's so easy and it's probably a bit embarrassing not to have been making it regularly before now, although the day job sure can chew a lot of energy and time - the joys of being at home nesting for the winter eh? Anyway, take 400g wholemeal flower, add 50g oatmeal and 50g of whatever you like ;) for example wheat bran, or other 'roughagey stuff', a teaspoon of baking soda and teaspoon salt - mix all together with a pint of buttermilk and one egg. All goes in a loaf tin @ 200deg for an hour or so. Lovely crunchy crust emerges with deliciously wheaten goodness - great with the soup - and we add pumpkin and sunflower seeds when available in the press for more crunch. Beats anything shop bought and freezes well too. And I'm afraid to say it might just even beat the bread my mother has been making for the past fifty odd years...

As for herself - it's smiles all around and plenty of chat. Nearly, teasingly, sleeping through the night. We shall have to see how we go. Twelve weeks yesterday and truly, truly the new boss of the Holly Cottage...not sure who was the old boss.....but I guess that really doesn't matter anymore now ;)

A Journey of 1000 miles

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

Lao Tzu (604 BC - 531 BC)

The first step marked by blue skies,
not North American but Irish Birch

I must confess my ignorance on this one - I had no idea that this quote came from Lao Tzu, he being  of Chinese philsopher and poet renown. An alternative translation from the Chinese (Bynner 1944) would read as here at your feet a thousand-mile journey have birth. It's an apt saying for all of us taking on new projects, new challenges or setting about making a change in our lives. The first step is taken with the idea in our minds and then if the idea is to come to fruition, feet begin to move step by step forward, onward and onward, inching closer and closer to the goal at the end of the proverbial 1000 mile mark. 

Most of our days here are defined by walking -  walking to the woods, walking up the town, walking around the garden. One of the main reasons I was attracted to this house all those three years ago was its proximity to the woods - a place where a walker could go everyday with a boisterous Holly and always see something new. Or see something that is the same thing yet completely different from a change in perspective depending on my own outlook, or my own frame of mind. So when a call to walkers was issued by a colleague in Chicago to embark on a 1000 mile journey, well of course my interest was piqued. The call comes from Liam Heneghan - ecologist and writer - of DePaul University, Chicago. Liam draws inspiration from the walking of Robert Llyod Praeger. Prager (1865-1953) - for those outside of Ireland - was the veritable godfather of all Irish naturalists and an inspiration to all of us who passed through the Botany Departments of Irish Universities since the 1950s.  You can read all about him in Liam's article. Liam's call is to all interested in walking and those with a keen naturalist's eye - no expertise or qualifications necessary. The call is to walk in the spirit of Praeger in your chosen area - it can be urban or rural or somewhere in between - and marvel at the small things you might otherwise have overlooked in a less attentive mode. There is already a growing community of walkers that can be followed under the #1000UrbanMiles on Twitter. 

Through a portal of Hazel
12/11/2013

For our part, it will be a matter of walking where we can, when we can. For the most part it will be Alannah, Holly and myself but I do hope to rope others in along the way. We consciously became part of the #1000UrbanMiles community last Tuesday, and in the interest of accuracy I have added the #1000IrishMiles to make a clear distinction between the urban streets of Chicago and greater USA cities and the highways and byways of my own Irish countryside. I confess that I am no Praeger and I don't find myself  stopping to identify every last moss and liverwort as I go, despite my great training under the UCD Botany and Zoology Departments (when they existed back somewhere in the 1990s). But I do appreciate everything I see, and I hope to meet others along the way that can point out the more subtle minutia of interest that my macro lens overlooks. And 1000 miles is nothing really - nothing over a year. And walking is such a transformative process, beta brainwaves turning into alpha brainwaves and all that stuff. That is of course once you remember to switch the mobile device off so the ringtones don't upset the perfect wave forms. 

Now if we were to run it, well that would be another story altogether....

Sunday Morning

Sunday morning, brings the dawning

It's just a restless feeling by my side
(Reed, Cale) 

And here we are. It's a cold Sunday morning and we awake in the dark. Nothing new there - the dark still reigns supreme at 6.30am, only beginning to lighten when the hour of seven is well established. Alannah is an early riser and as a perk of being mother, I get to watch (with her) the sunlight coming back around every morning. Some days it is bright and golden, with the light reflecting off the amber coloured beech trees that line the Charleville estate walls, and some days it is dark and damp with light barely making an impression behind heavy grey clouds that block out life-giving-sun's light. How different from the summer when light was barely gone for more that a few hours, and when getting up at 5am seemed like the wisest thing to do to ensure we didn't miss an ounce of all those glorious June mornings and hot afternoons.

Woodland winter palette awesomeness

But best to stay in the moment, in the here and now. Best not to linger in the past summer months or waste precious winter wishing for the brighter days to come. Best to embrace the dark and welcome it for what it brings. For this is the dark time, the winter dreaming. Time to think, time to read and time to process thoughts and ideas and images of the year gone by. Time to rest the body but feed the mind. Time to kick up fallen leaves and enjoy the winter silence. 

Here in the Holly Cottage, the pace of life has slowed down by a level or ten. We wake early and pull the blinds, waiting and watching as the light comes back to illuminate the now very quiet garden. The winter garden is now the stronghold of bold robin, brave wren and stoic blackbird, as we - less graceful humans - step back and leave  them to it, letting the soil breathe its heavy winter sighs and yield whatever sustenance it can to our hungry feathered friends. Green manure has been sowed on bare soil to hold and nourish it in the springtime; half the spuds are out of the ground and hardy brassicas and root vegetables are left to wait it out. The Setanta spuds are sadly, but surely, widely and badly damaged by burrowing slugs, who found a nice damp  home inside the nourishing starchy homes in an otherwise un-slug friendly summer. We think - we hope - the Sarpo axona variety fared better - they are much smaller in size but seem to have been less attractive to the cunning slime-mongerers. There are still some beetroots left in the ground, along with parsnips and turnips ripe for the stewing and roasting. But the most beautiful of all things green in the garden at this time are the bulging winter cabbages, sown early last spring and almost completely forgotten about under a wire net until a few weeks ago when we started looking round for what was left to eat. We won't go hungry ;) 

Most of the day is spent in the Holly Cottage kitchen now, escaping to the leaf littered woods when we can. Holly is making herself sick on acorns but I can only hope that someday she will learn. While  Holly forages, Alannah is beginning to take a peek at the world outside from the safety of the baby carrier. Sometimes I look down to check she is still with us and I see her bright blue eyes watching the scene as we walk past giant oak and tumbling pines. What must she think of it all? What impressions and what cascade of neural networks are becoming established as her brain is processing all this new information?

All this got me thinking, more. And so the last week I have been delving back into old philosophy books and trying to re-assemble thoughts and theories that get squeezed out of focus when the mind is in work drive. The work of Socrates, Buddha, Descartes, Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel, Hume, Kant and Nietzsche - not to mention Darwin - all these names and ideas are buzzing around my head as I distill and decant and try to see the world from their perspectives, making sense of my own. It's fascinating how thinking changes through the centuries, and yet I find that the fundamental truths and realities stay the same. Each one of us must make our own sense of it, and this is one of the most exciting and sometimes frightening aspects of being human - that we can make sense of it, or at least that we can try and wonder in awe at the whole thing as we do.  Like Lou Reed and John Cale's poetic reflection of a Sunday morning. 

Sunday morning girls

She is thriving of course - two months last Wednesday and grown out of her newborn wardrobe completely, filling the three month sleep suits more and more.  Pink is her favourite colour at the moment, mixed up with white and purples and lilacs. A marked contrast to the yellows and greens of the wood, she strikes a defiant pose as bright pink bundle as we stroll through that earthy palette of autumn-come-winter temperate woods. 

Time to get back out into it, this time with Lou Reed's voice echoing in her ears and in my heart. Thanks Lou (1942-2013) - how beautiful you are. Play it loud ;) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnGoIF5N_-Y