No.224

For the past few days, I’ve been on a coastline of flint. Enveloped in memory and erosion, the second family funeral service in a handful of weeks, revisiting the kinds of objects—artefacts—in familiar houses that are lodged deep in the body, having grown parts of myself around them easter after easter, summer after summer as a child.

As evidenced by the gap, this newsletter has needed to sit still for a moment. Shortly after No.223 there followed three weeks of preparations prior to moving house within Scotland, some more death, some leaks in the roof, and a strong need to simply forget how to use a computer keyboard for a time.

The gratefulness for your continued reading and support of this place is considerable, your presence here always welcome, and I’ve chosen to enter into the newsletters of this year with one of the most treasured formats you’ll find here, the list.

December ending and January beginning, a list:

1. Sleeping within newest memories, then sleeping next to some of the oldest

2. A station stop announced midway through a rail journey—“Audley End”—but it sounds like orderly end which is perhaps what I’m perpetually trying to achieve

3. We decided to postpone any semblance of either Christmas or New Year until the end of January

4. Moving all of the belonging-objects about a quarter mile through the town, to live freshly at the other end

5. Snow covering the surrounding mountains, decisively and generously

6. The very flat, very dead, barely recognisable corvid in the grass, as we retrieved garden plants

7. The largest roadside rabbit, eyes alight in the headlamps, soft feet tucked into frosted grass

8. Walk-running to airports, running through airports, running to train platforms

9. (I thought I would be able to think very well on the train, but I could not, primarily because I’d bought the wrong type of ticket and had to re-purchase and this fact threw the thinking very well out of the windows that you’re unable to open anyway)

10. Scrabble, three whole games of it but thoughts elsewhere, so I write down things other people are saying in the margins of the scorebook, which dates back years and is more or less a historical document

11. We found two arguably ancient choc-ices within the large freezer in the garage of my no-longer grandparents’ house, and proceeded to unwrap and consume them in the deep cold while looking at things on shelves, and in the dust, and in the rafters

12. The tiredness is waiting for the right time to lift itself out of the body

13. The unsurprising but disappointing result of a planning department meeting of the North Norfolk County Council members—my father in car the returning afterwards, having spoken for approximately 2:38 in opposition of a diabolical carpark placement, said it felt a bit “like losing the FA Cup”

14. Four deer standing in low winter sun along a hedgerow lining a field, on the line between Norwich and Cambridge

15. We are surprised by how well the oven works

16. The poem by Mary Ruefle, Keeping It Simple:

    I take the bird on the woodpile,

    separate it from its function, feather

    by feather. I blow up its scale.

    I make a whole life out of it:

    everywhere I am, its sense of loitering

    lights on my shoulder.

17. Looking out of the airplane window in the dark, you say that from above humanity and its illuminated spread looks like an infection, a virus

18. But without my glasses on it also looks like we are travelling through the deepest galaxies, constellations, a sea of cosmic dust—I cannot tell Manchester apart from a nebula

19. Tiny wood splinters are still working their way out of my hands two weeks after sanding the floorboards, I attempt to entice a couple out using a sterilised sharp thing from a tiny pin cushion which sat gathering time on the kitchen windowsill of the Norfolk house

20. Remembering that in Saskatoon a single man planted 15,170 red pine seedlings in 24 hours

21. I still keep a list of all the beds we sleep in

22. There seems to be a huge number of fire exits and relatively few fires, or, the fires are in places that cannot choose to exit, and then in the places with exits we simply choose to ignore fire

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Even more images by photographer Emma Hardy (previously in newsletters No.126, No.147, and No.169).

— Caroline Bird

and Mary Oliver, from “North Country”:

“You listen and you know / You could live a better life than you do, be / Softer, kinder. And maybe this year you will / Be able to do it.”