Climbing Snowdrop Hill

I have been at a loss for words many times in my life. I have also had panic attacks at a keyboard or typewriter that froze my fingers or curdled my prose, but the past month I have had the place that words come from stuck tighter than an accordion with its leather strap firmly in place and stowed in its carrying case.

I am not altogether certain what caused that clamping down, but fortunately it has eased a bit.

Lately more often than walking down to the moss, I head up the hill. Without my noticing it, the colour has started coming back into the world. And while I was trudging up the hill trying to outrun my own wordlessness, the snowdrops were getting on with their own work as well.

Yesterday I walked out in a perfect spring day-- soft golden light, occasional whisper-breezes, and a discernible rhythm of resurgence. The cattle at the edge of the road did no more than lift their eyes as I passed by. The gorse were giggling with their little yellow tips just waiting to burst out into uproarious hilarity.

At the top of the hill I was gifted with one of the quirks of a quiet day--from the distant lochan I head the hard working downbeat of a swan's wing. Having been alerted by a sound like a sheet flapping on the clothesline, I paused to watch a pair of swans descending to the loch. The quirk of wind that sent the sound had shifted, so I watched in silence as the swans circled gracefully and then came flapping onto the surface--wide feet outstretched to brake their descent with all the grace of school boys careening down a well polished corridor. In a moment, they were down and folding their wings into the model of aquatic grace for which they are noted and admired, but I had caught them in that unguarded awkwardness suspended between two worlds.