The Darkest Days

And so we have come to the darkest days. It happens every year and yet it always amazes me - all that uncompromising and dependable cyclic nature of the seasons (that is of course ignoring the impending prospect of ongoing climate change, but no doom and gloom in this post!). It's a harsh beauty - all that distancing from the sun leading to a dark and cold time, counter balanced by Christmas lights and beautiful frosty mornings...but all to be reversed come Saturday and the winter solstice (yay). 

'tis the season to be Holly

And why so harsh? Harsh because there is a stark absence of green and yellow and orange and red - the palette of the autumn that we love to watch in the easy days of October and November. Now there is only brown, grey, green and a tinge of blue - brown on the ground, grey on the trunks, some green in the trailing ivy (deceptively widespread in the woods and welcome shelter for blackbird and smaller woodland bird species) and blue in the sky, but blue only ever for precious minutes when the sun peeps over the horizon and the sky is refreshingly clear of grey clouds.  The storms of the last few weeks have completely stripped the oaks and the beech of the Charleville woods and the leaves are rapidly disintegrating back into the earth - the very fabric of the stuff that will bring forth next year's pale green recruits. Fresh faced leaves that will be ready for a season of turning light and carbon dioxide gas into food for the colossal stems that support them - the giant wooden towers of beech and the king oaks. I know - amazing really. Those small and unassuming power houses of green energy that turn light into sweet sugar. And all because of chloroplasts....but, I digress into the minutia...

It's also harsh because we have to wrap up in warm clothes and blanket-like scarves to shut out the cold and the damp. Sandals no longer work and wellies are de rigeur. Holly doesn't bother with either of course - she is an all-weather and all-functional kind of girl. And Alannah is amazingly immune to the cold - she is wrapped up of course but these days she stays awake on our winter walks, staring up into the broken canopy. What is she thinking? She is obviously stunned into silence because at all other times she is cooing and gurgling and 'talking' in her own sweet way. I try to talk to her about the trees and the birds, and the red squirrel that we've met three times now - always scarpering up the same tree - but she is blissfully immune to my breaking the silence. And all the while she just stares with those beautiful blue eyes - her, silent. It's all waiting for her to discover. 

And what about the beauty? Well, apart from Alannah and the bold Holly, the beauty is in feeling the biting cold breeze as we walk through the open fields, the warmth of the blinding winter sun when the clouds break and the feeling that spring is beckoning already - it's there in the knowing song of the blackbird - waiting beyond these darker, damper days. 

And what else do we do these days apart from get into the thick of it in the wintery woods? Very little I'm afraid. Bringing up baby is very basic - feeding, changing, bathing, coaxing to sleep, entertaining, distracting and then a bit of writing and emailing for me when I get a chance - laptop balanced on a cushion and writing with one hand over a sleeping baby. Some highlights of the past few weeks - the walking in the woods and the hinterlands of provincial Irish towns of course (over 100miles of the 1000 target), a successful heart saving exercise for Alannah's granny (my mother), various jaunts into town to catch up with friends for pre-Christmas coffees, the launch of Paddy Woodworth's great book Our Once and Future Planet (more of that again), and meeting up with work mates at the annual Biodiversity Action meeting. 

Holly is such a kidder...

I guess the greatest highlight of all is being a passive onlooker to the wonder that is a child's pace of growing. She is standing, rolling, watching, giving orders and basically, increasingly, ruling the roost. However, I'm reminded by the experts in the field of mothering that this status quo must change in order for peace and balance to reign. And so once Christmas is over, we must all - Holly and No. 1 Dad included - develop the elusive and all important baby routine....we shall have wait and see. In the meantime we'll stick with the policy of going with the flow, however chaotic that is. It always seemed to be so much more fun to me...

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....