March is the month of false promises. A few days ago I was in the yard watching the rooks tend to their newly hatched chicks in the trees above our house when the first bee of the year flew overhead and landed in the ivy. It stayed a while catching the warmth of the sun which starts to clear the rooftops at this time of year. The next day the worst of the winter arrived. It was sleeting in town first thing and I took the dogs up onto the hill wondering if it had turned to snow up there. The lower slope was a sleet-mud bog, but as I climbed to the summit the ridge turned white, the surrounding hills becoming a sideways blur as the snow rushed in on a north wind. As usual I was ill equipped for the conditions. My ripped jeans were soaked in minutes and my walking boots, which long ago cracked their seams, let in every bit of freezing moisture. My hat protected me for an even shorter time before it became a saturated rag. The snow was driving, stinging my face as I turned to see where the dogs had disappeared to. They were far away chasing the ghost of a fox and returned steaming and ecstatic much later.
I managed to bend into the cold and keep going towards the trig point where I normally stop and say a few words of gratitude for the new day, for this place and its inhabitants. But as I got closer there was a complete white out. There are no gorse bushes at the top, just sedge and turf which had been smothered by the new snow. Cloud had dropped onto the ridge which reduced visibility further. Above me, below me, to the left and right was utterly white, something I’d never experienced before. The almost silence of snow and the white blindness was a dream-like combination, or the fade-in to a dream. And then the sensible city boy within started to nag me about the danger of exposure, which he may or may not have exaggerated. Follow your footprints back before they disappear, he said. And I duly did. Exposure sounds like a good way to go to me, but I’m not ready for that fade-out yet.
The artist Peter von Tiesenhausen built a picket fence across his land in Alberta, Canada for decades. Each year he erected a new eight foot section which he painted white only once. After that the section was left to degrade and break down. After a couple of years the paint faded and began to peel off leaving silvery timber beneath. After a decade the timber softened and began to collapse. Gradually the earlier sections of the fence returned to the land, like the tail off of a calligraphy stroke. All around his property are works which are composting in this way - carved figures, wicker towers, handmade boats. Makers know that the edges of the things we make are blurring before they’re even complete.
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