Reminders of wildness.

The mountain trip temporarily postponed, village life goes on. Tonight I helped two old ladies wheelbarrow Winter feed up the hill and into a hayloft. My reward, a fine pumpkin.

The female Septuagenarians (upwards) sit in the evening on an old bench at a bend in the road. It is known locally as the ’frying pan’ as it keeps the warmth of the day’s sun.

In indigo and black they sit chewing the fat. Yesterday, my birthday, a neighbour called me to help her with another seasonal task. Three of us sat on a crimson rug splitting and teasing out porcelain white beans, taking a half-time break for Turkish coffee. The only English they knew, ‘are you married’. A pre-requisite in village life for a man newly turned thirty-nine.

Later on I went to collect sour milk from a sheep farmer across the river. He had just lost a sheep in the fold at the back of the house to a bear. He deduced that it had come on two legs during the night and the dogs maybe thought it was a human and kept silent.

I am constantly reminded here of a wildness we only scrape the surface of in Britain (except maybe in our seas). Wolves and bears are in our psyche and not so distant past, yet when we walk in the countryside we share the position of ‘top of the food chain‘ with no other creature. Not in my case today as I ventured into the woods with trepidation.

Sloestica sometimes reminds me of Angela Carter’s short story ’The Company of Wolves’ where the village is only a begrudging guest of the wild and given half a chance the wild will push the door open and come on in.

My time in the village seems almost more fictional than real. Like a character of E.M Forster’s, I ‘breakfast’ on the sun drenched balcony absorbing my surroundings, but wholly rejected by them for my foreignness. The chickens scratch in the dust and clouds scud about wispy and inconsequential in a clear wash of ipomoea blue sky.

I finish my painting and creative diversions in the early evening and take a walk with one of the large dogs bred for protecting the sheep from wolves (‘Mitchell’) who seems to have adopted me. Laughter, barking and the background hiss of cicadas surround me as the lazy dusk transforms into soft-pawed night.

© Jon Macleod, 2006