Before the storm

One of the irritating truisms upon which much of psychotherapy is based is that there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. (It’s Hamlet, not Freud.)

Human being are notorious for imbuing almost everything with meaning, much of it unhelpful. A tree is a tree is a tree. But last week, I looked at trees with love. As friends, stoic companions to my daily life. They were reminders of solidity and continuity, of the determination and endurance of a plant that reaches for the sky. The shapes against the sunset were individual and distinct and yet familiar to me. The birds that made their home in their branches woke me each morning through my bedroom window. 

But the words from the radio have changed all that. There are warnings, amber then red. Talk of it being the worst since 1987. Hundreds of miles an hour. I remember 1987. I remember being a child sitting at the kitchen table and my mother cutting at the painted over shutters to release them and fold them across the windows. I remembers the trees that fell then, and I look at the trees now with different eyes. The lime trees that are so close to the cottage that I cannot grow anything in the front garden, a result of their thirsty roots and the deep shade they cast. Their limbs suddenly look like they may snap and drop any moment. The two sycamores (I find sycamores hard to love at the best of times) that have grown up like weeds, twins, within ten feet of each other. Surely their unplanned proximity must have weakened them, and maybe they cannot both prove resilient in the face of such a battering. If they fall backwards, they will crush the espaliers and the greenhouse. Fall forwards, and the uppermost tips will fall on the cottage. Rowena, an exile from the village who lives in the wildest part of Scotland, asks after the unfeasibly tall eucalyptus that sits at the end of Mr B’s garden, but which would crush the mill, Rowena’s family home, if it fell. I offer reassurance, but this is based on nothing but hope. We both know that it could go from standing to lying in moments if it was so minded. 

I hate waiting. Not waiting in the sense of the dentist’s waiting room or the post office queue. I mean the waiting that is the liminal space between anticipation and certainty. I kissed my husband over a table in a jazz club in Covent Garden on our first date because I could not bear the waiting a moment longer and I had to make it happen and be done. I just cannot sit in that inexorable, unbearable space of uncertainty.

A storm is coming, but it has not yet arrived.

As the warnings increase in urgency and intensity, the air itself remains resolutely still. I go out and stand at the end of the kitchen garden and there is an almost muffled silence. I don’t know if it is my standing and noticing that makes it so, my expectation of movement that contrasts with the reality of what is, or whether this is the very embodiment of the calm before the storm. 

I come indoors. I pull the shutters across the windows. Like my mother, it is all I can do.

The storm

I am away from home when the storm hits, in town. The windows rattle and rain hurtles horizontally past the window. Spent and broken umbrellas are tossed and tumbled along the street, wholly inadequate to the task of protection in such conditions. At the back, in amongst the solidity of the network of terraced brick houses and the cars and the walls, only the cherry tree dances to show the strength of the air. I feel the stretch of the umbilical cord that holds me to home like an ache. I worry about the roof, and the greenhouse, and if Hugo is upset by the unfamiliar noises howling down the chimney. In my mind’s eye, I see one of the limes that line the front of our cottages falling on the thatch. 

As I drive home, I am vigilant for damage, alert to signs of change. There are some trees that have fallen across the fences and I notice them like a gap in the teeth. There is something shocking about such sudden ends. One has fallen across the main road but it has already been pushed aside when I reach it. Like a steam of ants, human beings resist their path being impeded for long, and they will find a way through.

Me and the dogs walk in the tail end of the storm. The woods roar in waves, filling my ears, sounding for all the world like the sea. The air is cold and hard, filled with the lightest of hails and the tiniest of branches, whipping in my face. A pheasant, caught and flung by a crosswind, flies across our path, squawking in surprise and alarm. A pair of buzzards dance together and apart, keeping high in the sky, well above the whipping tips of the trees on the side of the hill. Hugo’s ears flap in his eyes as we run over the tall bridge over the goyle, just in case the creaking of the trees is really a creaking weakness in the wood of the bridge. 

We retreat as quickly as possible to the safety of the cottage. There is a bitterness to this weather that is not just about the cold. There is something like cruelty in the way it cares so little for what it passes through, breaking and smashing in its path. A reminder of our fragility perhaps. Or a reminder of our lack of respect of the strength of the elements that care little for human concern. Or just the projection of intentional attributes onto a physical phenomenon.

I light the fire, and we eat baked potatoes with butter and salt. Potatoes remind us of the solidity of the earth, of soil, of the need to be grounded, if we are not to be swept away.

After the storm

A morning of surveying. Two panes of the greenhouse have gone which surprises me. Once on goes, often all of them go and the frame twists and buckle. From the cottage, it appears to be intact, but close up, I can see where the path of the wind has popped out the glass and scattered it on the asparagus bed. Despite the potential for this being their busiest day for a decade, the glaziers are shut. This means the weakness in the structure will remain, and I will worry until the panes can be refitted. 

Although at first glance, the damage seems to have been lighter than feared, the other end of the village is cut off from power. A baby was born on Monday to a neighbour and we offer food and warmth, heaters and help. I drive up the hill and see where an old tree has snapped in two, held together by a web of ivy that coats the bark. It has fallen right across the power line. This happens frequently; the houses on the other side of the village pub are connected to a line that comes down the steep and treacherous Corfe hill. On this side of the pub, the power is connected to Taunton along the flatter, less tree-strewn road into town. We are often a community of the haves and have-nots when it comes to electricity. 

As I go further up the hill, into the woods populated by the most beautiful of beeches, my favourite tree for its majesty and its strength, the damage is more dramatic. Beeches are known for dropping branches or for falling without warning, and their roots are never quite as deep as you would expect them to be. Every so often, I see one that has toppled, prone amongst its neighbours, the roots, still covered in soil, silhouetted like a star. A ‘bang’ drawn as a cartoon. One, then another, then another. An old dead oak, snapped, the jaggedness of the break showing how it was rotting from the inside. 

Today the winds are only 40mph. Usually, that would have me strapping down the pots and checking and rechecking the latch on the greenhouse, waking in the night to see if I can see it upright in the moonlight. After the last few days, I am positively relaxed about it. It is simply a little breezy.

Because there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.