Good Friday 7 April 2023
I hung washing out yesterday on our newly-installed rotary dryer. I have not had a proper outdoor drying set-up since childhood. It was windy and sunny and it all dried. Very satisfying. There may be a frost this morning and I did have to warm up by wrapping myself in my Oodie last night, but I do now feel it is spring.
Nicky had a shocker of a drive home yesterday. It took her seven-and-a-half hours for a journey that, with stops, should have been less than five hours. When she set off at ten, I joined her in the car for about three miles so I could walk back home. Full sun didn’t emerge until a bit later but I enjoyed the walk, taking photos and chatting away to myself.
I then started noticing some black marks on the road. Slugs. Sleek black slugs. I don’t like slugs. But if I had to like a slug, it would be a slender, glossy black slug like them. They all seemed to be heading in the same direction, from one side of the road to the other. As a result, many had been run over.
I remember at infant school, and maybe junior school too, collecting frogspawn and all of us being fascinated by the transformation into miniature frogs. There is frogspawn all over the place here, from more obvious places, like our pond, to long-term muddy puddles. I remember someone telling us that the most frequent roadkill is frogs. I feel sad about that, and indeed felt sad to see a few splatted frogs on the road yesterday, but now I know how much frogspawn is around, I feel slightly less concerned for the frog population, factoring in roadkill as well as their usual – predators? That seems a bit melodramatic for frogs. Anyway, it’s all very spring-y.
As for the birds, they are all over the place – adorably noisy – but as I walked alongside an area by the road where trees are being felled (just by our closest loch, essentially cutting off access to one of my favourite patches of woodland), I noticed the birds were frantic. It was kind of distressing. Then I felt even more sad than I felt for the slugs and frogs; I’m pretty sure the birds were searching for their lost nests. Logging is not all bad, but I hate seeing it (even more so when it’s close to our house and an area where it looks pretty, slivers of tall trees alongside the road) and realising that they probably are going to cut down the trees on one of the prettiest corners of the river. But the birds, that was upsetting in a different way. Our neighbour has some tall sitka spruce alongside part of his land – I can see them now, from my usual writing chair – and they are full of birds. The only pleasant thing about walking past the felled trees was the smell of them, but even that felt sad.
