The heavy snowfall in mid-February melted after a week or so, even on the highest fells. For a while there were strips of white on the lee side of some dry-stone walls and in deeper shaded gullies. Robert Macfarlane called these ‘snow-bones’ and once you’ve heard the name it’s hard to unsee the snow skeleton of winter in the spring thaw.
The oyster catchers returned about a week before St Valentine’s Day when the snow was still thick. Now there’s a flock of them probing the meadow by the river and they rise into swirling flights over the dale.
In Nidderdale they say the curlews come back a little later than the oyster catchers, on St Valentine’s Day itself. That’s west of the dale where I live. The curlews migrate from the tidal flats of Morecombe Bay, and as far away as Tralee and Waterford in Ireland, so would arrive in Nidderdale first.
I’ve been listening for them. It’s said that the first day of meteorological spring is the first of March, but for me it’s when the curlews return. True to form I heard the first call two days after St Valentine’s Day when I was up in the early morning out in the coal shed. Now the sky echoes to their haunting, looping, call that memories cling to, as in Ted Hughe’s poem ‘Horses’: May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place./ Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews,/ Hearing the horizons endure.
I’ve also been listening to a fascinating series of radio programmes about ghosts. What is St Valentine’s day for us was the start of the Parentalia festival for family ancestors and “shades of the dead” in ancient Rome.
In other cultures and times the connection across generations seems more porous than in our own, in which the dead are gone and buried. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs I’ve had a long wrestle with the ghost of my father. I try my best to avoid his turns of speech; but it’s impossible to escape genetics and the woman he took up with after my mother died told me that I looked like him. I imagine she thought it was a compliment, but it made me recoil.
Yet I have to deal with it and lay the ghost to rest. Until I do it will be walking with me in the undead hours. So slowly slowly I’m chipping away. The first layer is to get it to the stage when I can talk about it. The last therapist I went to told me that I needed to be able to see things from my father’s perspective. That caused the shutters to come down.
I’ve gradually been levering them open again to the point when I’m ready to go and see a therapist again as I’ve developed the language to be able to articulate what I need to say. The problem is, as always, finding a therapist that works for me. Any advice gratefully received. Has anyone got experience of working with a therapist online? That would open up a lot more choice as I’m living in quite a remote spot.
Rowan on the Moor
A Moodscope member
Information about curlew migration in the Yorkshire Dales
A History of Ghosts by Kirsty Logan
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