“SHE’S away with the birds,” we used to say. And now, standing on my very own synthetic wolf skin at the bedroom window as the sun streams in, I want to howl and head off with the birds too.
Last summer we found an app that offers recordings of birdsong. At the tap of a screen you can romance the cry of the curlew, curse the crazy chippit of a magpie, lose yourself in a blackbird’s song.
Then we sat in our suntrap out our back and played the blackbird’s song to our blackbirds who nest every year in the rowan tree. We hadn’t much faith that they’d answer... but yes, the song came right back, clear and true.
Hoppy is our adopted skit of a blackbird. He tumbled from his nest in the long ago and lived under our shed for his first ever spring. Not that his parents gave up on him. They watched from on high in their rowan tree and squawked madly, plunging and dive-bombing a mad-eyed ginger cat who went after their baby.
Hoppy found a soul mate in my husband. He would even hop on to the windowsill and peer through the glass, asking his ould mate to come out and bring a bit of a feed with him.
Hoppy perched on my foot as I was hanging out the washing. “Great drying weather,” I’d tell him, as I pinned out the sheets.
Last summer seems a million miles away now. We seemed more hopeful, more open to baking bread and apple tarts, to sitting in the garden and letting our hearts soar with the birdsong.
Our joys were simple. There was a newness about wearing crop circles as I paced in our handkerchief garden, about neighbours standing on the doorsteps clapping the NHS, about the children’s crayoned rainbows on every window.
Our rainbow drawing is curling at the edges on the study window, the Sellotape browned and less sticky with age.
We have tired of the news bulletins and the statistics of doom and gloom. I’m anxious to donate my hulking computer back to whence it came. The toad work squats in my study and I want to say, away with you back to the office, let me draw my boundaries, leave work where it belongs at the big swing doors of the building.
Like Blake’s songs of innocence and songs of experience, we’re living a “before and after” kind of a life.
It feels like 10 years have gone by, not just one. It feels like we’re coming out of a dark underpass and blinking into the sunlight.
Underpasses, subways, tunnels under the road never really took off about here. Too much opportunity for mischief or worse. I missed my lift once 40 years ago because I took such an underpass to cross a busy road in Derry on a visit to my aunt and cousins. My aunt laughed as she told me that nobody used that underpass – well, almost nobody.
“Dogs and prostitutes” she said. Dogs, prostitutes and me, I told her.
And even as hope stirs and people pack their bags for Portugal – they’ve got the green light haha – it feels to me like it’s not over yet.
I’m in the glass half empty brigade. It’s the spoonfuls of sugar thing. When life is good and you’re feeling great, you have loads of spoonfuls to hand out. But when things are rocky and life bombs you hard, there is hardly a spoonful to give out. The supply is limited.
Yes, there is a beauty to a Sunday afternoon on the Ormeau Road when the pavements are heaving with men and women nursing pints on street corners, couples sipping lattes on crowded pavements, children playing hide and seek under café chairs.
But I’m in the other tribe – those of us nervous to dip our toes back in the water, hovering at the edges of our own lives, in the shadows, losing the will to reconnect and over-friendly with the sanitiser.
Look back on these times and what shall we remember? What shall we forget? Imagine a time when we reach out without hesitation to shake a stranger’s hand. Imagine a time when people can chat and laugh and linger in the churchyard after a funeral remembering those they loved.
Better to hold on to the searingly beautiful moments… the gift of a blackbird singing back to you in the garden.
