Winter’s coming and it’s getting colder for us and for all the wildlife around, including birds like this one. Here’s a challenge for all birders: what do we think this is? At first I thought ‘owl’ but on looking at it more closely I don’t think it is. I asked a local birder by email, with no response, but there were a few suggestions as to possibilities. This was taken through my living room window a few winters ago. The answer as to the identity is given below the next section if you want to see if you guessed correctly.
It is a Red Tailed Hawk, fluffed up from the cold. It was difficult to be sure, as mostly these birds migrate south for the winter. In Nova Scotia, however, they stay year round. If you guessed that, then well done!!
English fog in the countryside lends a lovely softness to a scene, such as this one, which was on a walk near the river close to Coningsby in Lincolnshire.
I hope everyone’s Monday has some gentleness to it. This is being posted from my blog, so feel free to visit from the link if you want to see more of my photographs and stories.
When we lived in England, I spent a number of years working in the town of Ipswich, in Suffolk. In those days (1980’s) we tended to park a vehicle and walk around the friendly little town, both during the day and at night. The last time we were there, however, in September of 2018, we parked our car (at a very expensive rate) to walk to a restaurant in the town at night. There were 3 of us including my husband Steven, but even so we all felt so uncomfortable, so unsafe, that I resolved never to enter the town on foot again at night. The streets where we walked were in the same part we had known so well. But they were so different that it was as if we were in an entirely unknown town. Where was my friendly, familiar Ipswich?
As in this reflection, my perception of Ipswich was turned upside down. This photograph was taken during our visit of 2016 when, even then in the friendly daylight, I was marvelling at the fact that it looked totally unfamiliar.
It’s time to revisit England. Not literally, though a little while ago we had thought to return this month. No, this time I am thinking of England at my favourite time of the year, when I always wish I were back there. It was April, 1968 when I first visited. I had just left a Canada which was still wintry, slushy and tired of the cold and snow. England was having one of its balmy, even hot, sunny springs, with flowers blooming everywhere, birds singing and everyone friendly and happy, sitting on the grass in parks and by canals. I fell in love with the country then and I will always go back there in my mind every spring. There is nowhere like it for me. I have no photographs of the spring in England, I don’t need them. My memory holds it all including the warmth of the sun on my back and on my pale winter face, and the wonderful scent of the spring flowers. Every year I think of the lines from Robert Browning’s “Home Thoughts From Abroad“* – “Oh, to be in England Now that April’s there…”
Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry – Ellie Kennard 2012
And then another line comes back to me from “A Shropshire Lad“** by A.E. Housman “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough…” Many years later, the first real home I lived in in England had two ornamental cherry trees outside the front door. To this day every time I see a cherry tree in bloom, I am transported back to that time and the joy they brought me then.
Through the cottage window
There were few flowers to be seen on our trip back to the UK, but some of the scenes brought back just as many memories. It’s funny how even the interior of a modern park home, one of many almost identical in tight rows, can seem like a quaint cottage when it is filled with the things brought from just such an old home. Everything about this said ‘cottage window’ to me and the simple treasures brought to it from such an old kitchen filled the modern space with a feeling of solidity and timelessness. The little lidded pots for tea and coffee had made a graceful transition to sit on a modern windowsill, and the bird feeders transplanted to the tiny garden were so familiar that as you looked out beyond them to the golden leaves on this new riverbank you were once again standing in the kitchen of the ancient cottage on the river bank in the Suffolk countryside.
Cottage autumn window – Ellie Kennard 2016
The things we choose to keep
When we move to new homes, we choose the things that we want to keep around us, things that represent in some way who we are and who we have been. Here, this window hanging plant crossed generations and was selected to be brought through multiple moves. The horse brasses in the sitting room, tide clock and seascapes from Suffolk hanging on the wall as if they had always been there all serve to connect us all with past windows, past cottages, past loves, friends and families. No casual visitor could guess why such a plant, such simple possessions were carried through sad and happy times, places and lives, yet, even without guessing, something does come through, something more powerful than a simple object.
Memories through a cottage window – Ellie Kennard 2016
Looking around the home we were staying in I was warmed by the memories that each piece of decoration brought back. They all opened a window onto the past that was still there, though so far away in time and miles.
