The bathroom of my new house overlooks an old stable block that has a small chimney which at one time carried smoke from a fire beneath a big laundry boiling pot. It’s a relict from Victorian times, and like many things here in the upper Dale, it’s still there unchanged even though it’s no longer used. Just after the thaw I looked out of the window mid-morning and there was a tawny owl, sitting on the chimney pot.

It has been minus twelve degrees Celsius for five nights in a row. Everywhere, the meadows and the fells, were white with ice frosted snow. Then suddenly the temperature went up 15 degrees. Snow melt swelled the becks and green reappeared.

I don’t know much about the feeding behaviour of tawny owls, I listen to them calling at night and assume it’s in the dark when they are out and about, so I imagine the owl must have been hungry to be hunting in the mid-morning. It can’t have been easy in a week of freezing weather.

It’s been a big change for me moving deep into the dales and shifting to part-time working. It will take some time to adjust and adapt. I’ve been reflecting on how far I’ve come in a little over a decade. I don’t want to dwell on the changes, but I do want to draw a line under them and move on, to say “that was then, this is now”.

Twelve years ago I was escaping my marriage with six black bin bags of clothes in the back of my old second hand car. It’s not something I would recommend to anyone; and there is a lot I could say about why I made the move, but I need to find the right way to say it otherwise I will just be talking my way through barbed wire.

At first I lived in a one room bedsit, then community housing, then the house of a friend, and then a succession of rented houses in a village on the moor. Court settlement of the finances wasn’t until two years later, when I was then able to buy my own small cottage. Then followed the rebuilding of my life, the death first of my mother then father; and now the move to the upper dale and shifting to part-time work whist I get my finances sorted out and full retirement planned.

Except that I’m not thinking about it as retirement. I’m thinking about it as rejuvenation. To be able shake off all the emotional darkness of the past dozen years. To come to terms with the years before those. And most of all to settle down and do what I want to do, which is to be in wild nature and a nice community, and have a serious go at creative writing.

Watching the owl from my bathroom window reminded me that I’d survived a prolonged freeze, and life was now about preparing for Spring. There will be plenty more weather ahead I’m sure!

Have you had to cope with a long period of emotional and perhaps financial hardship and emerged the other side? Or perhaps you’re going through it now and need some hope that it will end and a new life begin - there were times when I was in deepest despair, but kept on keeping on and have come out of it a changed person with pretty much everything about my life different to how it was before. For the better I think.

Rowan on the Moor

A Moodscope member