大象传媒

As predicted, the snow only lasted a scant day....it whirled down from the sky, all bonny, white and glittering, and settled on the ground, despite the winds trying to scour it across the isle, and gave us a glimpse of the start of a bygone winter.
The pond at the side of the track froze, almost entirely. Two swans live there overwinter..in times past I`ve walked down to the pond and had to break the ice for the swans and ducks so they could swim in a space a little wider than a couple of feet.
But those were winters that dazzled in their brightness, fields full of powdery, drifting, sheets of snow. Those were winters that glittered in low lying sunshine, where mornings brought lemon coloured glows flowing liquidly across a creamy landscape, and evenings turned the gentle hills and dips to quiet fire.
Those were winters I stood out in it, watching the flakes drift down around me, watching them settle on the old wooden wheelbarrow..now no more, after being turned into splinters by a gale....and watched the vegetable gardens become low white humps and hillocks where the stumps of the years brussels and blown cabbages hunkered....
Those were the winters I watched wild birds shelter in the bare twigs of the rose bush hedges, starlings, sparrows, tiny wrens and bright, bold robins.

But last winter, no snow at all...only wet and grey misery, nothing spectacular, nothing real.
And this winter, one small day of snow that brightened the landscape but briefly, and though winter is hardly over yet...I`m wondering if that`ll be it for the duration...back to the rain, the winds, the `in-between-ness` that isn`t quite proper winter but also isn`t anything like spring or summer.
Sigh..I miss the winters of the past.....
So I take solace in the sunrises, which I`m always up to see....swathes of fire across the horizon, a still low winter sun bringing news of the rain to come by way of messenger clouds, heavy, blood-red and fierce looking...and that beautiful, perfect stillness you sometimes get before the island wakes and when even the sea kissing the shore is a hushed thing, tiptoeing into the day.
And I take solace in the sunsets, a different shade of red and gold, painting the fields and the sea to the West with crimson and blushing the land like an embarrassed maiden.

The swans have the whole pond to swim upon now, and are joined by herons and wild mallards and my own lazier, fatter, domestic heinz 57 ducks....
The sea is frothing white and grey and chattering on the shingle beach, rolling the rocks around and clawing at the sandy beach.
The shattered pieces of my hen hutch still lie trapped against the field fence, waiting for the winds to drop so I can haul them back and see if anything can be salvaged.
The skies are what we call north of the Border, soft....pearl and palest pink, cloud bleeding into cloud with blurred, feathered edges, nothing harsh but nothing warm either...
The homes dotted about Sanday, for the most part, rise up from the soil like they grew organically from it....earth coloured rock and slate tiles weathered and mossed and lichened like the stone dykes that circle the gardens.
Some of them show smoke drifting skyward in the winds, fragrant with coal or peat and blown into oblivion after a few feet.
Around the pond, reeds and grasses stand stiff and unyielding, bronzed and bare, winter-stark.
It`s bleak, here, often.
But it`s one of the bonniest place on earth.