Bog Myrtle & Peat

We were finished early – so on the spur of a moment, we went to hear the hill birds call at Brampton. It’s an hour’s drive and the dusk was cool and windless in the early days of April. Even as we parked the car the curlews flew between us, and it hurts me to know that our own birds have gone, and those of us who still have love must travel. 

I said something like this, and you replied that it will come right; that things have a way of working out. I never understood your resignation – it’s my instinct to fight back, but perhaps it’s wasted work after all. You’re keen to let me let it go, but I note that you would never compromise on memories of your own. Nothing dies for you, and if my inclination is to heal the loss by recovery, you achieve the same end by cutting slack and standing back. 

As we walked, the redshank rose in one continuous moan, hanging themselves like stars in the sunset, saying Too, Too, Too for the wetland. We stopped to watch the peewees churn and the owl come up from the barn’s astonished door. Then on a final climb from the valley’s floor, three curlews came at once from the Solway – high and light to the moorland edge. Two fell like cinders to the land, but a third one turned and sang in long-imagined loops to the hillside. And you recalled the meaning of every single note in the grand glissando; the weight of your father’s lambs in your hands and the thick, intruding thorns of your childhood, so deeply embedded that it would sting you more to dig them out than simply leave them be. I’d hardly know you without those knocked deformities, and all the weight of hand-me-downs which hang around your mouth. I understand why the curlew brought these things to mind; my own skin boils with irritated scars, and when all we have to hold are ghosts, a fresh embrace of warmth is scalding.

An ambulance came to collect you two days later. As they placed you gently on a gurney, you might have been anyone’s mother, with only a puzzled grin for me. Then you were gone for several months, and it was all but death for us on the wards, with your slate so suddenly clean. And now when I ask what you remember of our evening in the hills and the moor birds softly calling, you only say “tell me”.