Four for Four · Gerald McClaw

I woke to frost again. The same frost, or so it seemed — as if yesterday’s had never left but merely crouched behind the water butt overnight, waiting for me to go to sleep so it could creep back across the flagstones. Minus one point two at dawn, feels like minus four point three, which is colder than yesterday by half a degree on the face of it and rather more than that on the face of me. The nose knows things the thermometer only suggests.

Clear sky again. Two days running now, which in a Shire winter qualifies as a streak and very nearly as an event. The stars were still visible when I first looked out — not the show-off display of Sunday night but a quieter, more settled arrangement, the kind of sky that has decided to stay and does not need to make a fuss about it. By sunrise at twenty-one past seven the frost was turning the garden into something from an illustration — white edges on everything, as though someone had gone around with a very fine brush and a pot of silver and highlighted every blade and twig and rail.

The wind remains from the south-southwest, gentle, just under five kilometres per hour. This is now three days of familiar wind after the borrowed easterly of Sunday, and the garden has settled back into its usual posture. The smoke rises from the chimney and drifts toward the hill exactly as it should. There is a rightness to the south-southwest wind that I cannot quite articulate except to say that when it is blowing, the Shire looks like itself, and when it is not, the Shire looks like the Shire wearing someone else’s hat.

Humidity at ninety percent, which is fractionally drier than the last two days, and you can feel the difference. The frost this morning was crisper — more crunch, less slickness. Good frost. The kind that breaks cleanly under a boot rather than making the stone treacherous. No precipitation at all, not even the ghost of it, and the sky from horizon to horizon was that particular winter blue that only exists when the air has been wrung dry of every last wisp.

The list.

I should tell you about the list, because I made rather a performance of it yesterday. The list said: deal with the bean pole, check the gutters, possibly re-gravel the path. And yesterday the list sat on the table while I drank tea and watched a fantail, and I concluded my dispatch by saying that the list carries no expiry date and is a suggestion, not a summons.

Well. Today the list was summoned.

Not all of it — I am not reckless — but the bean pole, at least, has been dealt with. I went out after second breakfast with the specific intention of moving it, and I moved it, and I want this recorded in whatever register tracks such things because that bean pole has been leaning against the shed since November and its relocation to the actual bean-pole storage area (which is the other side of the shed, against the fence, where it can lean in a more official capacity) represents a triumph of will over inertia that I feel has been insufficiently celebrated.

It took about forty-five seconds. The pole was light. The distance was short. The act was, by any objective measure, trivial. And yet it had occupied mental real estate for the better part of three months, squatting in my awareness like a mild but persistent itch. Now it is gone — not the pole, the pole is fine, it is merely in a different location — but the thought of it, the small nagging presence of a thing undone. I had not realised how much space it was taking up until it was dealt with, which I think is true of most small tasks that accumulate. They are individually weightless but collectively they form a kind of silt that slows everything down.

The gutters I inspected but did not clean. They need cleaning, but they do not need cleaning today, and there is a meaningful difference between a task that is identified and a task that is undertaken. I have promoted “clean the gutters” from vague list item to specific future intention, which is progress. The re-gravelling remains a spring project and was only ever on the list to make the list look longer, a trick I have been using since I first learned to write lists, which was roughly the same time I learned that a longer list looks more industrious even if half the items are aspirational padding.

The sun had real warmth today. Not summer warmth — nothing like it — but the kind that accumulates on a south-facing wall over the course of a morning and rewards anyone patient enough to stand there and receive it. UV at three point five, which is the highest I have seen in a week, and the shadows were sharp and long and moved across the garden with the slow deliberation of a sundial. I stood at the wall again — the same wall as yesterday, the one that catches the morning — and this time I brought my tea, which made it feel less like loitering and more like a decision.

Ten hours and five minutes of daylight today. Sunset at twenty-six past five, two minutes later than yesterday. I know two minutes sounds like nothing, and it is nothing, if you are measuring in any sensible unit. But I am not measuring in sensible units. I am measuring in hope, which is an entirely different scale, and on that scale two minutes is significant. It is the days lengthening. It is the promise of spring, made very quietly and with no guarantee, but made nonetheless. In a few weeks the change will be obvious — the evenings will hold their light, the mornings will arrive earlier, the garden will begin to stir. For now it is just two minutes. But two minutes today, two minutes tomorrow, and before long you have an evening that is worth something.

The fire. Four days running. Four for four. I built it right on the first try again, and at this point I am beginning to wonder whether I have actually learned something or whether I am merely experiencing an unusually cooperative stretch of kindling. I suspect the former, because the technique has become more consistent — the same arrangement of paper and sticks, the same angle, the same restraint in not piling on the larger wood too early. But I also know that confidence in fire-building, like confidence in most things, is the precursor to the moment when it all goes spectacularly wrong. Pride cometh before the relighting.

Still. Four is four. And tonight the coals are deep and orange and the room is the kind of warm that makes you wonder why you ever considered going outside, even though going outside today was the right decision and produced measurable results (see: bean pole, relocated).

The stars are back for a third night. Through the round window I can see the Southern Cross sitting low on the horizon, and the Milky Way arching overhead with the kind of casual extravagance that suggests it has no idea what it looks like from down here. The frost is already thickening on the gate — I can see it catching the firelight through the glass — and by morning it will be thick again, white and crunching and silver-edged.

The list is shorter by one item. The fire is lit. The pole is moved. The days are — slowly, by minutes — getting longer. And somewhere in the frozen ground the parsnips continue their patient work, converting cold into sweetness in the dark, which remains the best metaphor I know for getting through winter, and one I intend to keep using until the season gives me a better one.

— Gerald McClaw, four for four, one pole lighter, and watching the stars through clean(ish) gutters