Reasons to be cheerful

Planet-spotting, sunbathing and mowing - on how turning back towards the simple things is helping me to remember where pleasure lies.

Winter has felt like a long push uphill in the dark, but for the last few days I’ve watched a pink light creep around the garden in the mornings. Day after day of mud-hardening frost, blue skies and birdsong have followed the end of dour February into March’s bright beginning.

As the sun has returned I’ve slithered from between the damp cracks and mud into the garden to lie, like a cold-blooded creature, a supplicant to the sun. I’ve lowered my grateful body to the ground and waited for the heat to revive me, my face pink with relief.

Other times I’ve performed this ritual kaleidoscope through my mind; I’m a 20 something single parent in a short skirt with a penchant for Marlboro reds and men who drive drunk, who skin up on their laps on the motorway, who are never there when I need them; I’m a married woman in my 30s trying to do the right thing, reading the paper on a blanket on a Saturday morning, laughing and teasing my beautiful boy; I’m a teenage girl sunbathing with my cousin, stealing Grandma's cigarellas to smoke in her shed; I’m a 40 something runaway with a thirst for the wild and a dog-child under her arm.

Beside me a tiny copper-backed beetle straddles a blade of grass. Beneath the bench a blue speedwell is flowering, its paper blue petals striped with purple, like a cat’s lashes. Over the road, where all the sullen winter men have worked on an extension to the care home, comes the sound of laughter, of spirits lifting. Sound carries differently when the sun shines, I realise, like it’s bouncing along with the light. It holds an expansiveness. In the sun-trapped garden I can hear the beaks of chaffinches eking seeds from the teasels, the flit of wings, a bee humming. Over the road a nailgun is fastening the new roof to the battens in staccato.

I watch the shadow of a fly on the wall, seed heads waving in the breeze. It feels as though time has slowed, but also that life has started again. A spider jumps between stalks, leaving skeins of silver thread glinting in the sun. I put out seed for the hungry birds and break the crust of ice on the green water. Late in the afternoon when the air is cooling again, I haul the mower, glued with swallow guano, from the shed. I glory in remembering that my body can move and that there is still strength in it after a winter’s indolence. I like to see the garden’s contours emerge as I mow, to remember its shape as well as my own, to strip off layers, to push and pull and feel alive. I’ve read that women in their 40s and 50s are doing more exercise than women in their 20s and feel admonished; during the winter I retract, like the garden, sulking, until spring. It’s only gardening and walking that save me from seizing up altogether.

To market, to market

Buoyed by the sun, on Saturday morning we walk into Crediton to the farmers’ market. Keeping six hens mean more eggs than even we can eat, so we sell the surplus on the doorstep, gathering new friends and a bowlful of coins. Like Jack clutching the magic beans we take the coins to market to exchange for something wonderful. We buy a sausage roll with buttery pastry that flakes the ground as we eat it and which Cooper snuffles up. At the town square we sit on the steps, looking across at the coloured awnings, at the hatted man playing guitar, the stalls filled with vegetables, game and cheese, homemade pesto and canelloni. The sun is shining on us and we drink coffee. Cooper greets every dog and passerby, sticking his head, where he can, in shopping bags in hope of sausages.

We spot a friend and their toddler and wave them over. I get down on the ground and play stones with the toddler and Cooper calmly suffers their enthusiastic petting. I let the toddler take Cooper’s lead and we walk him around the square, stopping to greet other dogs and watch little people in rainbow coloured jumpers and tutus running around. We make a game of putting our rubbish in the bin and beg coins from Glen’s pocket, marvelling at these little units of currency, hard in our hands. We go back to the guitar player to throw them into his guitar case and jig to the music.

Home again, home again jiggety jig

At home Glen and I sit on the bench and talk, like two butterflies drying newly emerged wings. After a winter of unemployment a job is firming up for him and we are both feeling relieved. The night before we’d left the warmth of the fire to climb up to the orchard and look at the skies, trying to catch, at the last moment, the alignment of the planets. Jupiter and Mars were glowing orange and red in a net of a billion trillion lights above the house. Saturn, Venus and Mercury had slipped below the waterline of the horizon, but we knew they were there. I felt, for that moment, that life was aligning too - a new job for Glen, the completion of projects that have weighed on my mind for months - a website launched, a piece of work published, a new project in the offing. Things were moving.

It feels good to remember that even while the world feels like a bin fire, good things can happen.

Next weekend I’ve arranged to borrow the toddler. Little people are good at helping you to focus on the little things which are really the big things. We’ll play in the garden and talk to the hens, collect the eggs and perhaps even try to make a cake (?!).

I hope that sharing these simple things might help you feel a bit better too. I’d love to hear what’s keeping you on track. What simple things are bringing you pleasure?