Wintering

The decorations are down and carefully packed, the tree has been mulched at the Whitstable lifeboat station and our visitors have returned home. My house is duller, colder, emptier.

I am into my January wintering. I haven’t gone anywhere. My special place to winter is here at home, especially in-front of the log-burner. Wintery music, short story audiobooks and nature podcasts accompanied by steaming cups of earl grey tea are part of my hibernation, as are biscuits, crochet and of course, felting.

I take a good portion of time off from making birds through Christmas up to the New Year. Having a social media and website switch-off is necessary with limited energy reserves. After four years living with long covid, it is easy to embrace the give and take of life with a long-term medical condition. Think of me as a mobile phone with a broken battery that doesn’t hold its charge very well. Festive fun with family can be tricky to balance, so I let the birds rest quietly for a few weeks.  

January too stays slow for me. The quiet cosiness of an empty daytime house lends itself to restful mind-wandering, pottering about, dusting where the decorations have come down, moving books on the shelf and thinking of hearty soups and stews to make when its dark.

I have ideas, so many ideas. In the quiet simpleness of January they wheel like birds in the sky and I try not to force them to ground. It’s a delicate process, letting the mind wander. Make an idea perch too early and it will land heavy and solid and stuck, bereft of energy and possibility. I keep a small blank-paged notebook beside my seat, held open by a pen. It is very tricky to write down enough to remind you of your thoughts but not too much that you trap them. I pop down snippets of stray thoughts that flit through or memories that gently blop to the surface of my wintering warm-mind-mud-puddle. The best stay opaque, fluid and malleable.

The first written note in this book, from way back last year, says “recorder/blackbird ‘both black and shiny and sing in a fluty way’”. I can trace the silvery trail of things I made last year through the notes in this book. ‘Curve of swifts wings’ became two common swifts flying flat against the wall. ‘Very light watercolours’ found its way onto a 2D wool-painted background for a flying owl. ‘Water being lost’ turned into a tiny winter dipper on resin-wetted rocks.

‘Make pennies to represent pay for them being killed?’ has ‘Sparrow Clubs’ written above the page. This is a poignant note now, prompted by a friend who gifted me a local history pamphlet about his tiny Suffolk village, and who recently died. His name is there in that note. I made four little sparrows, felted birds surrounded by delicate, wired, gold-foil rubbings of Victorian pennies because of it. I still have one of them, looking so pretty, the coins twinkling in the low winter sun and dancing about the tiny wool bird in the air disturbed by passing shoulders.  It is a link to that lovely friend, held by me and three others, but only with that meaning to me because of that note, a strange and delicate unique connection.  

I’m still adding notes to my little book (what will ‘winter shadows’ become I wonder?) I’m sure there will be many connections visible across the coming year, some I can see shining clearly already as I needlefelt before my log-burner with my steaming tea and a posh-left-over-cheese sandwich. I hope you get to do some wintering over January. And if you do, maybe you could share with me, where those ideas that you get when you let your mind wander take you. I would love to know them.