It arrived in the mail some time back--a gift from Martin, my English blog/FB friend of many years. "I know how much you love the English countryside," he said.
This a gem of nature/memoir writing--a love letter to the flora and fauna of the English countryside and a cry of alarm regarding the many thoughtless behaviors that threaten this ecosystem.
Nicola Chester has, like Thoreau at Walden, has traveled much in the landscape she calls home. She quotes the poet Patrick Kavanaugh: To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime's experience.
I parceled out the reading of this book over weeks to better appreciate the beauty of the writing, the minutiae of her observations.
In search of spiritual healing after a miscarriage, she walks up a beloved hill near her home "to lie by myself in the chalk grass. There were lapwings. I was close enough to hear the creaking beat of their owl-like wings as they dived, tumbled, and called. The soaring 'pewit, wit, wit-eeze wit that followed was quite the loveliest, most joyful sound I could want to hear. Blue-black clouds dark as swallow wings gathered in piles above the wood. I lay back among the harebells, clustered bellflowers and the little purple hop-hearts of quaking grass, shifted to avoid a thistle and disappeared. I scrunched my eyes and mouth tight as a harvestman spider ran over my face. Burnet moths collided with tiny grizzled skippers in the air above me. A buzzard mewed. Out here, at this moment, nature decides what happens. Everything connects and has its place, its lifespan, its small death; every thistle its bee."
Highly recommended.