Right out on the coast a village braces itself, as it always has, against an unhindered wind; its subsidence even to a breeze was infrequent, varying only in degrees of onslaught. To newcomers and visitors it was an unceasing harangue.
Amongst the villagers was an old man. In summertime, when it was sultry for miles around, he would sit outside, reading, and felt the hours to have the perfect freshness of spring. Around the autumn ides, he pursued with skill a variant of boules of his devising: with wooden spheres, of a lightness to be bent at right-angles past a pole upon being cast out into the blast, and then career away towards a far-off jack.
Very low islands were flung at all angles out from the shore, and these were as much a part of the life of the village as the mainland. On one of them, the old man kept a few sheep and goats, subsisting upon shrubs, seaweed, and grasses which grew thinly on the underlying rock — nothing taller than the shrubs grew. Though they would often shelter in one particular spot (where there was a strewing of rock), the animals traversed the island; the intrepid plants which grew there, with their particles of colour, were dependent upon them.
For a long time the old man had milked the goats, making, with a wooden churn and pats, a sweet butter that was delectable upon a baked dessert. But he now only occasionally rowed over to the island: sheared the sheep once a year — for their sake and the tradition of it; and otherwise prevailed upon the animals only to the extent that nature might not, he felt, fully allow for their welfare.
The old man was woven into the community. He had a kind of earnest lightness that, though his conversation typically had to be sought, endeared him to the villagers, who were an open-hearted sort. Upon entreaty and the providing of a rich milk, he still made his butter, especially sought after at the beginning of advent. And he in turn cherished their chance kind words and glances; their unexpected politenesses.
Yet that which the old man felt deepest, keenest, the most lovingly, he had not in eight decades found a way to communicate. Beautiful fragility: a tiny dunnock at a moment's ease amongst the quivering twigs of a hedgerow; the melting of a patch of grass in early-winter sun to an impossible green — all around it rapt and white-bristled.
The old man died. His sensibility was lost, like a night sky in which the constellations were scintillating and plenitudine, yet indistinguishable to us in the streetlight.
It was late November, and the villagers mourned. But with the coming of advent, anecdotes of the old man were recounted with vigour, tastes of his sweet butter were brought to mind, and in this way his passing contributed too to their cheer.
That December, on the 23rd — around midnight — the wind abruptly dropped; receded suddenly to an almost unheard of calm. Snow fell like whirling, ruffled-lace dresses, taking lightly to the floor in their turn. Throughout the night, it settled upon the village's streets, rooves, and islands.
Two little girls lived in the village, a few gables down from one another. With the whim and grace of butterflies, they pattered about together, and would their childhood years through: from the one's home to the other's and back, running, baking, drawing, clothing, and finding.
They awoke that Christmas Eve to the snow and the softness of the wind. Post a nominal breakfast, they set to sculpting it, and to tunnelling through heaps of it; ate hot, sugared, hour-cooked rice porridge for lunch; scurried out again to toboggan upon it, red-cheeked from dragging their sledges uphill and descending in a rush of cold; and tumbled back in once more, to a festive dinner.
The wind abated for the first three days of that yuletide, all through. Then the sea returned to it its customary power.
Their childhood entwinement, and that particular Christmas, was a part of the little girls' souls. But they were parted in adulthood; both fated away from the village.
One grew up to be a mother, delighted in by her children. Bustling and dynamic, she left the goodness in others no choice but to emerge. In her jobs — all in the same town in which she and her husband first found employment — she curated friendships with colleagues that lasted beyond them.The other grew up to be a botanist:
A life on the little wickHer partner was a book-cover illustrator, her works characterised, as she herself was, by a quiet juxtaposition of the playful and the contemplative. In their thirties, they came upon a little, round peninsula — at high tide not unlike the island upon which the old man's sheep and goats dwelled — and a cottage there that they bought; they lived in it together thereafter, tending it.
shining with clear flame.
The teeming
flower-languages' linguist.
Heather-reader.
Even in sober Latin
lush flora thrived. You coaxed
brave wildflowers out upon the barren
moors in us, tore up bunches of colours from scorched thoughts.
A spring came in which the life on the little wick
without flickering
blew out.
Later, at the time of year at which the old man would have been perfecting the launching of his boules into the wind, her childhood companion too died: frail, but as busy in mind as she ever was. Nearing their last, each thought of the other; but their families would not have understood, and they did not speak of it aloud.
In the old man's village, the wind was as it ever was, buffetting in off the sea. The villagers were, in a modern way, as accustomed to it as they ever were.
Midnight on the 23rd of December was once more nigh. Throughout the village, just before the children went to bed, a mince pie had been placed upon a little plate for Father Christmas, a drink left in a thimble to fortify him, and a carrot placed out for the reindeer. Their fathers and mothers carefully now left only a few crumbs and drops behind, and a stub of the root end of the carrot.
Before turning in, they wandered over to the window for a last look out. Taken aback, they saw that the lights hung up all around did not sway on their threads, but rested stockstill, just as they had during the Christmas of the little girls' childhood.
As then, snow-lattices began to pirouette gently down. There were magenta crystals, combining subtly in the radiance of the village lanterns with the white flakes; and the villagers felt, within themselves, at one with that without.
Written in November 2023, with further tweaks into December 2023, when I first made it available. The quoted verses are from a translation I made a year or so before of the poem «Den første» by Kolbein Falkeid.
Last updated: 16:47 (GMT+1), 20th January 2024