It’s my first walk after Covid. Here in Scotland, we still have to self-isolate for 10 days, and because I live with a GP husband and a lodger, that meant sticking to a couple of rooms and only sneaking down to the kitchen with mask and disinfectant spray when they were out. I even stopped patting the dog.
On my last walk before my positive test, the strath was deep in snow, every tree cloaked in white, the forest silent. Now that I’m out again, the world is transformed. Scraps of snow still linger on the hills, but the valley is clear. Today the sun beams from its pale-blue sky and the cohorts of clouds look too lazy to do very much.
Though still only 5C, the air feels fresh and light on my housebound skin. I never lost my sense of smell, so I bask in the fragrances of soil and trees again, of the earth opening. Most of the forest near me is deciduous; the aspens, birches and oaks hold all their new life in tight fists, skeleton limbs stark against the sky.
But the birds! The difference in a fortnight is striking, as though they all found their voices when I lost mine. The tracery of branches quivers with them, flitting and bobbing, twittering, calling, piping and singing. Here are all the tits, tiny but insistent, the chaffinches with their downward tumble of notes, the corvids still quarrelling and ruffling feathers, and a lovely mistle thrush, singing its heart out. Doves flute, gulls carry the sea in their cries and a high buzzard pierces the blue. Somewhere, a hidden woodpecker drums along.
Down at the marsh, the water’s edge is fringed with delicate ice patterns, suspended in the rushes just above the surface. Beyond, a half-frozen slush melts back to water and further still, two swans are feeding, their long necks slipping down into the dark and rising again in graceful curves. All of it catches the sunlight – the ice and water, the wet grass, the swan feathers – and tosses it back, shining.
I am blessed beyond measure to have come through Covid so easily, to be alive and free in a time of troubles, to hear the world sing on a day like this. Praise be.
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