It was the snowdrops we’d come to see. “A leap of faith,” you said, because you hadn’t been to check they had arrived, though why would they not have done? You’d made your local pilgrimages, as had I, through lanes and churchyards. We’d watched the shoots, the sword-blades piercing earth since well before the solstice, knowing them as a promise. They’d been promising us snow that never came, but we knew that the snowdrops would.
I’d spent time with them in a distant churchyard, enthralled by one clump, all looking like the constrained demure handmaidens in Attwood’s dystopian nightmare, beautiful and soulless. And I found in amongst them one renegade: a bold purple crocus, that might have been the evil bishop, but I chose instead to see as a woman, not a maid, not a handmaid, a brave life-affirming creature deciding to be exactly who she was, deciding to bloom where she stood. When people speak of having a favourite flower, they mean a favourite variety – I’m capturing memories of actual flowers, individuals, who deserve my noticing.
Somewhere I have a photograph of one of my garden crocuses, also purple, blooming in actual snow. Maybe that’s why this more recent one endeared herself to me. She was an affirmation of being what I choose to be, and a memory of how long I have been working with that idea. Perhaps she was a much-travelled reincarnation.
It was the snowdrops we’d come to see, but I was called away from pretty white lanterns to the earth-brown light of water, nibbling away at banks it might yet conquer. The River Glaven was higher here than we’d ever known, almost kissing the under-arch of the old bridge by the ice house. Last time we were here, we were craving shade.
Travelling up and down the country by train over the last few weeks, I’ve watched the fields full of standing water. Bright pools laughing at the sky and mocking ploughs and planters. From The Borders to The Thames, rivers are beyond their banks. Woodlands are swamps. Paths have passed from view. The land seems to be reaching back up towards the sky. And of course, by ‘land’, I mean the water.
I look at the diminishing space between bridge and flow, and hold my breath, air is squeezed out of that hollow and I wonder how to breathe.
And it is still raining. Lightly today. The kind of rain that you can happily stand bare-headed in. Stand and watch it stipple the lake, watch the ripples widen the concentric circles, circles of influence, circles of interest, circles of concern. I watch individual drops vanish into the whole, smallness upon smallness, growing into benevolence, or threat.
Remember that long hot summer, when we sat here, by this bridge, begging for shade, praying for rain? They say that all of our prayers are answered, it is merely that sometimes the answer is ‘no’. Sometimes, it is worse. Sometimes the prayers are gathered up, for a batch response…and every single plea and wish for water falling, is being answered now. I watch every drop of rain, and wonder if each one of them was a moment of someone somewhere here, thoughtlessly praying for rain.
We walk along the path to where the chalk stream once surprised us, with it’s sudden being there. Not so today. Today, the watermeadow is more water than meadow. There is a pale sun and rain still falling. The Norfolk peace is, quite naturally, shattered and torn by the fighter jets overhead. So normal here, that their screech is no more startling than the caw of crows, and most days calls forth just as little thought.
I think of my recent few days by the Thames, where we watched the waters rising, and thought about the catchment up-stream and how these paths and fields will continue to be inundated long after the rain gives over. Which it doesn’t feel like doing.
Waters keep rising, stealing through the night, through the earth, climbing into pools, claiming way-routes and ley-lines and making a different map of once familiar land. High in the trees, a woodpecker morse-codes its warning, as if it can see what is coming.
Beyond, I can hear distant cars, oblivious.
I watch the light on the meadow-water, a darker echo of the sky. That cloud-shrouded sun looks more like the moon in the pool reflections. Stalks and trees are darker there, too, more malevolent.
Clouds thin, a little, just enough for sun-warmth to touch skin and make me look skywards – but it is still raining and the ink I’m trying to write with seeps into the page, words bleeding away. Without meaning.
