And Yet We Go On Living

The wind is relentless, the windows rattle, the chill seeps. But we are warm and safe, with beauty to spare. How are we so lucky when others are not?

Tonight the dusk sky is yellow – a strange smudgy yellow hovering like an extra-terrestrial visitor behind the bare-branched oaks. I can’t decide whether this is an improvement over gray.

I dash outside to pick a sprig of lemon thyme from a plant that survived the winter snuggled inside a stone wall. I feel the cold so acutely, it’s like a headache-inducing Slurpee from the 7-Eleven carpool stops of my childhood. 

It’s the wind that carries the cold straight through me as if I were an apparition, barely stopping to blow up my loose sweater as it passes through me on its way back out to sea.   

Back inside — the whirring of window screens, the rattling of window glass, the high-pitched whining, the sudden fury of angry gusts. They say it will blow 50 tonight. I bet the boats will stop running. I hope nobody loses a favorite old tree or a young sapling.

We are having roasted chicken thighs on a bed of lemon slices, roasted potatoes with smoked paprika, and a big green salad with lemon-tahini dressing for dinner. Nothing special. Comforting, familiar. We light the candles like we always do. There are two pairs of candlesticks – four tapers. Right now, two are blue and two are orange. I change the colors when the tapers burn down. I have a thing for candle colors, one of my random tiny joys.

There is a motley collection of vases and Ball jars on the table, each with a flower or two or three, tulips or daffodils or pansies, whatever’s come up from the hoop house. Some blooms are just opening, others are fading away. But they are all lovely and cheerful, a true antidote to this bleak Island spring.

Every afternoon when I go down to the hoop house to pick, I linger there in a state of pure gratitude. I lose track of time, puttering around doing mostly nothing, and the voices in my head quit hijacking my attention – an enormous relief from the constant instant messaging from my internal to-do list.

At the dinner table, I look at our food and our flowers. Farmer is curled at our feet. Our house has leaky windows and our rugs don’t match. But we are warm and safe. And we have each other.

I can’t help thinking of the people who don’t have shelter or food or safety. And the people who try to help those people. And the people who die trying to help other people live. And yet we go on living.

All over the Island, mama sheep are delivering baby lambs. Hay fields are showing off a flush of green. The first seedlings are moving out of greenhouses into farm fields. The rabbits who live under our deck are darting around the yard like bumper cars.

In the next few days, the winds will quiet and a front will carry warm air across the cold ocean water. We will wake under a featherweight blanket of fog and mist, a consolation prize for the bare branches. In the mist, the moss looks like a bed of jewels. Stone walls soften, hedges blur. The cliffs slide into the sea.

Our little Ireland.

There is so much room for beauty, even if our cold maritime spring doesn’t deliver the leafy canopies, the profusion of cherry blossoms, the sit-on-a-park-bench kind of warm spring days that the mainland enjoys. It is enough beauty, more than enough really, to make me wonder if it is real or from a story book.

How is it that this place, where the land and the sea are so much a part of how we experience home, feels so secure? How are we so lucky to live and thrive in the cycle of seasons, in such close quarters with the natural world – when others have no home, no place even to call home, much less a place to grow a garden or raise a flock of sheep?

I don’t know the answer to that, but I can’t stop thinking about it.

🌱

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