This day we got soaked, twice. That’s probably a fun thing in the eyes of someone without shelter, warmth or security. I write ‘We’ and it stranges me. I haven’t said or written we for 18 months, nor ‘our’. Our garden. We do it this way. Our home. We like this or don’t like that. That separation is a tear. A tare. A pervasive weed in the cornfield. I remember them way back in Norfolk days and the faffdiddle pain in the backside thingy about us having to walk into the crop in order to remove the invaders. For acres and acres and all the way up to the horizon. T’was the only way.

Inside the rain, there are choices. I, no, we, but not the old we, were soaked in seconds and twice, as the heavenly rain canted sideways and upwards and fickledraft and slanty-sneaky in the short minutes from car to home or t’other. I had to change twice. But I could. I have options. I can warm. I can find safety. I have a change of underpinnings and overpinnings. Just saying.

The day, a day no doubt exhausted with all the rains of our island life in these times, slips into nightfall. It’s dark now. I close the curtains and whisper a thank you to the day, one I shared, one I felt alive in, got soaked in, laughed with others in. All of that.

I know that life lives on and it does, I see it, get soaked in it. But I also remember the we of me and I smile, I cry, I value what I had. Different now, ally mango but I like different.

A quote from an author I so admire. Sally Magnusson, from her moving book The Sealwoman’s Gift.

‘grief is not a rough stone the tides will polish in time but a storm that may abate but always returns, fiercer and angrier for the lull.’

And, she’s so right.

This morning I walked beneath the Still. The Still is a strange creature up here, on an island where winds reckon they can leap into any old mood, and without warning and without informing the helpful/not helpful weather apps on my phone, neither of which agree with each other. Much like the winds. Hallo, my friends, I say to the trees. Well done, you are still standing. They say nothing, holding in stasis. But they, unlike I and my schoolboy weather apps, just know more wind is coming.

I meet said wind this afternoon on another walk. Oh, Hallo my friends, you are dancing to the new beat, the beat of this wind, this not-yesterday wind, nor to the beat of a gale…….Oh shutup about that gale, they wheeshed at me and, ps, there is no beat to a gale, only rant and shout and punch and all of it beat-less, rhythm-less. I chuckle and bow to their deeper knowledge, and then I ask them, do you know when a gale is coming, a storm? The trees roll their eyes at me. Duh!

I walk on looking up to where the bony branches move and dance and sway and bend to a force they know of old even if I never quite know; one which has pounded skies and islands, seas and trees for centuries. Honestly folks, it is never going to change. The elements are four things we can contain, shut out, hide from, even deny, but never control. Not never (love a double negative) but only prepare for as best we can. Back in the days when humans just knew, feeling the change in smell, in the sky, in the behaviour of animals, who still work with the elements, we would plan our days so differently. We would be in tune with the forces that, even inside a city, could be our guides, our helpers and our warnings. Like the trees.

Did you know that trees will send more strength to their roots when they know a gale is coming? Did you know that they will also enhance the root support already in place for a weaker tree so that it might survive the gale? Check out The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. It will astonish you. This is why I talk to the trees. There is the overstory, that’s me in my boots and then, oh then, there is the understory which is astonishing.

Anyway. I stop to hear their song in the afternoon, watch the knuckle bare winter branches comb the wind. I hear their song, one for beeches, a different one for silver birches, another for hazels. I call them (the hazels) the chorus, and they have pulled me up on that. I explain that being one of a chorus is an individual role. Each one of you is important. Without you, or you, there would be no choir. They settle at that. I move on to the pine tops, singing away, slicing the grey sky with needle fingers and with their stop point half way to Mars (swaggering actually) but I get it. If I was 100 feet up there, I just might feel pretty good about myself. I watch tits dart from pine to pine, from fir to fir and it thinks me. This whole woodland knows itself. It knows what it needs and how to get it and it has held that knowing for centuries. We think we know how to live together.

Really?