brackets & bottlenecks

I saw a spotted woodpecker in the woods today. It was a surprising, unlikely sighting. Unlikely, because the chances of my being in the woods today were so slim. I'd have preferred to be hiding inside. Again. And were I to be hiding inside again I would have preferred to be eating my way through my body weight in crunchy nut cornflakes. Which is what I was busy trying not to do.

Remember when you couldn't even walk? Remember when you'd have given anything to have that sudden loss of strength returned, when you'd have bargained away any tonnage of crunchy nut cornflakes or toast or whatever, to be able to stride along a shingle beach again, when you promised to do better with your second third tenth chance?

Listening to ideas about savouring the moment and about making moments worth savouring more likely, I take myself off to the woods. Glorious sunshine, bright blistering blue sky and the grass is cool and long in the park, in the shady corner before the path veers up to the woods. Out of breath. Already glazed with a sheen of sweat on bare arms and neck where I've conscientiously applied sunscreen. (Yes, that's me, the boring, overly-earnest big sister who parks the car in the garage every night when mum and dad are away, while the others giggle on the patio, having abandoned the car on the street, smoking forbidden cigarettes, and congratulating themselves on having such a dutiful and dull big sister to carry the load of expectation forever. Can you smell burning? What’s that smell? A small silence while the lies break the surface with barely a ripple. It’s a barbeque next door. Smothered sniggers and whispers waft through the open window into the house later.)

I begin up the earth track out of the park and through the underbrush, wild and scruby. There's a bench at the fence edge at the top. Maybe a dose of savoured, sun-soaked contemplation there would soothe my soul. But as I approach there's someone there already rustling a broadsheet page-turn ostentatiously and feeling very pleased with himself to have secured the spot. The other day there was an idyllic cluster of family group with baby and dogs, at least it was idyllic until I emerged through the scrub and the dogs went crazy and rushed me...

I pass through the kissing gate at the boundary, along the allotments on the left, on a sanded path that scrunches rather than thuds with my steps. Many people are out but at this moment none of them are here. There's a hush that I barely disturb. I feel ghostly, only barely real. I’m nearly untethered from all that happens in the other life, from which I'm trying to carve out some savoured moments in which to remember it will probably all be OK and there's no real cause for panic.

I pass by a bracketed path over a bridge to the right, to roads and rush again. I go on instead to the dark, earthen path along the railway. Trains power through from time to time and never cut across the quiet, despite their whistles and officious timetable taking. The track descends, cool and covered and the earth is old and resonant under foot. I pass two young women. One has a pram, the other the tiniest fluffy puppy, standing transfixed in the middle of the path. The first one barks an instruction to the second in Polish, and I go past unacknowledged, beyond exchanging a quiet word with the puppy. I think they must be listening on their phones because there's music playing, and that doesn't quite make sense to me. On I go, with another strand of wonder meandering around, adding itself to the fog that's already clouding the space where my decision-making should be.

The path reaches its lowest point, and the woods begin in a stuttering confusion of paths. The convergence makes a little bottleneck lined with logs and bracketed by two railings that come close to each other at the top to allow a man through with a dog at his side, but to necessitate that she carries her bike over on foot, for instance. There are a mass of scrawny brambles here, in need of more sun than they'll ever see in this damp and sheltered corner. The rotten bench and disintegrating fallen trees never completely dry out and the fence is topped by spikes to stop us all climbing over into the cemetery beyond.

There are birds. Flickers of movement, masquerading as a twitching leaf in the breeze, or a sun loosened flutter of falling twigs. The song is instantly restoring. Conversational exchanges of elegant curlicues, answered distantly closely interruptedly. Chirrups and whispers, and the effect is almost instantaneous, stopping me in my tracks. I come to a halt as the music glimpsed earlier insists on my notice, passionate soulful full-throated, raw even, from way across in the distance. A sombre crowd in black is gathered round a grave and that singing is heart-stopping. Is there any soul on earth that could resist rising with such warmth and utter devotion lifting up the weightiest of wings? I sit down on a log, arrested. I must hear them, long to be part of them, look around deliberately and almost think of climbing over and rushing towards the music. It's hard to believe that others haven't torn their trousers or legs as they stream headlong to the heart of that sound.

The brackets, tracing the outline of a glass flask of long ago science-lab lessons, make a bottleneck as they slow down all the passers-by enough for me to overhear the old snippet of exchanges that I don’t belong to.

This young girl is painfully reliving the death of a beloved family dog at the vets, the distress of the elderly animal, the need to hold off on sedation because dad was coming from work and didn't want to see him with his eyes shut. Oh well, now you've got a nice young one there that you'll have for a good long time, Bye then, as the (obviously casual) companion - who else could leave her mid sorry tale with the crass substitution of one living being for another in the blink of an eye  - moves off in the opposite direction with her dog, Come on, Pops, and no glance back.

An elderly woman, trots along on weathered, sinewy calves in shorts, trips over a tree root and steps on one of many dogs getting underfoot as the path points to the brackets. She swears filthily and apologises conversationally to the dog. I'm making notes on my phone, trying to catch at faint hopes and take small actions whenever they suggest themselves, through the miasma. From my low and masked vantage point on the log, ears full of floated song and bird calls, my eyes drift up at a breeze flirting coolly with the sunlit leaves. There's tapping, too. I grope around in the fog to wonder if there's a drum with the singers, or a bike ticking on the approach, or some kind of work going on in the distance and, What's that magpie doing clinging to the side of a tree? Suddenly everything springs into clear focus. I am certain, as I still my breath, blink my eyes from the strain of the small screen, and try to manoeuvre my head so that the springy little twig tops are not in my eye line. I’m certain that this is a woodpecker. Certain now, that that's what is making that peculiarly resonant and robust tapping sound. That that’s what is bending its head back to survey the boles further up this tall and greyly deadening trunk, that flickers black and white speckled with a flash of red. And it's right there in the silence of my held breath.

A speckled woodpecker, not green. I've never noticed one before, and so nonchalantly going about its business, perusing other sites for tapping up towards the sky. Tap tap tap tap tap. Vigorous head movements look virtuoso insouciance personified, and eventually it lollops off with lumpen flying gait to the tree next door, and to the tree next door to that, floppy and ungainly in the air and almost instantly swallowed up among the leaves. Back into the realm of imagined marvels.

I sit on. And wait. I continue to look at the space where he was. Maybe he will come back again. I can hope. And bottle it in a glass flask for savouring later.

sept 23