Bog Myrtle & Peat

Spring has stalled. We need the rain to come and take us on, but the clouds are high and the nights are parched with ice. I lug buckets of water to the beasts in the bog below the house because the drains are dry and there’s hardly a bead of sap to suck in the yellow grass. Even the trustiest pools are cracked and white with scum like the hinge of an old man’s lips.

It looks fine and mild from the bedroom window, but there’s a snell wind in the east. We wake each morning and hope to find calves and fresh lambs, but here is hiatus. We need the weather to break and loosen these wombs, but the barometer stands on the highest peg and it won’t shift an inch. Perhaps the youngsters will come anyway, but this job would suit a soak and a sluice of warm rain.

So the days loop in relentless copies of all that has come before; bright, high and bitter. It’s a stuttering jam and it frays my patience until I growl at the monotony of it all. There’s only so much readiness I can suffer, so I make chores for myself. I brush the bull and rake out his winter coat into coarse pads of brittle hair. Then I sweep the byre and watch eddies of chaff and straw tumble away into the short grass. It’s good to hear the besom working, but the stubborn dust swirls up and falls behind me until it’s hard to see where I’ve been.

Ducks rush and gabble against the tall clouds and a falcon hangs above them, patient and bleak as a hammer.