Winter Work

Summers here are long, hot and dry; fire is a constant concern.  Years ago, when the house and its surroundings were a working farm, grazing animals kept the woodland understorey clear. These days there are no grazing animals here; in order to protect the house, and ourselves, as much as possible from summer fire outbreaks we spend a good deal of our winter days cutting, clearing and burning on managed fires the saplings, dead plants and unwanted shrubs which are the dangerously flammable woodland understory.    As well as affording us some protection this pleasant, albeit physically taxing, work makes accessible an otherwise impenetrable wilderness, opening up new vistas and liberating previously hidden, handsome rocks and fine mature trees. The cleared paths and glades admit more light, delicious dappled sunlight, transforming a dark wilderness into something of a pleasant, cool and shady park. Added bonus returns for our work are the wild-flowers that spring from seeds which have lain dormant the soil, in some cases for decades. 

I am aware that we are interfering with nature but the interference is only temporary; nature will reclaim what is hers soon enough.

Onward

I woke this morning to a new age, one in which I am labeled a year older than I was when I woke yesterday.  Strangely I feel no different.  Yesterday was the seventy-first anniversary of my arrival on this planet.  I marked the occasion by driving into the Tagetos mountains to enjoy lunch with Lisi at the Touristico Hotel on the summit of the Kalamata to Sparta road.  For the last few Kilometres before reaching the hotel I was driving between piles of snow-ploughed snow on a slushy snow-dusted road.  The hotel car park was covered with ankle-deep snow; the dining room was chilly but we found reasonably warm comfort at a vacant table near to a roaring, open wood fire.  During lunch snow began to fall.  A recently arrived family party occupying an adjacent table took fright, re-cloaked, gloved, scarfed and left to seek safer accommodation lower down the mountain.  By the time we departed, our car had become covered with a blanket of snow under which a rough coating of ice had frozen over the windscreen.  It was with some trepidation that I drove away from the hotel along a steeply-descending snow-covered road but there was little traffic to concern me and after fifteen minutes of so of very slow going we safely reached clear tarmac.

Will I remember this birthday?  As I can remember nothing of the other seventy it is unlikely.  If memorable birthdays are important, the fifth of January is not the best of dates to be born; particularly when they fall on a Monday!

Gathering firewood

For many years past, wood burnt on the stove that has kept us comfortably warm through the depths of winter has been olive wood we recover from a couple of the many olive groves on the hills behind our home.

The wood has to be earned.  Oil-olive harvesting practice here is one of simultaneously gathering olives and pruning trees.  The olives are carted off to be processed into oil; the prunings, mixture of leaves, twigs and branches, are left in the grove for subsequent clearing.  From the two groves in which we enjoy rights of common of estovers, in return for our clearing and burning the smaller material we gain all the pruned larger branches and logs.

There is some irony in that, this year during which we hope to leave here to relocate to Ireland, we may well bring home the largest haul of firewood we have ever known.

May Day 2014

Thank you Tracy for use of this photograph

Having no cattle to put out for the summer I honoured my May Day far, far away from any of the political rallies, military parades and church services that seem to have taken over this timeless celebration of the arrival of summer and its promise of further abundance; I celebrated the day by feasting, amongst chums, on roast goat liberally complemented with local wine at Maria's Taverna on the beach at Zapi.

Serving two masters

Spider at sunrise

I began posting to this blog in March, 2010. I was in Scotland at the time, a long way away from my home here in Greece.   I was there to help my sister to get our mother settled into a care home; she had had a fall from her bed in the house she had hitherto lived in alone since soon after my father died in 1993. The injuries she sustained necessitated that thereafter mother would need trained professional support for the rest of her life.

When, with my partner Lisi, I left Greece I had no clear idea of how long I would be in Scotland but imagined it would be perhaps three weeks; a month at the longest. In fact, occasioned by mother's further accidents at the care home and her subsequent admission to hospital, I was to remain in Scotland for the better part of three months by the end of which my mother had died.

Three months of being in limbo, largely between hospital visits, allowed plenty of time for thinking and writing; during 2010 I made eighty posts; in 2011 I posted seventy-three times.

At the beginning of 2012 I joined a drawing course, held locally and run by a retired from London professional artist. From then on the drawing / painting bug, latent apparently within me for years, bit and is yet tenaciously holding on. To keep a record of my artwork I began a second blog, “Engaging Right” to which I have posted most of the drawings I have made since its establishment. Inevitably “Sensateman” suffered.  In 2012 I posted to it only 37 times; to “Engaging Right” I posted 53 drawings.   Last year I managed 34 posts to “Sensateman” against 72 to “Engaging Right”. This year, almost at the end of April, this is my first post here; “Engaging Right” has had 37 posts this year.

It is a situation I intend to change. I very much enjoy expressing myself in both words and pictures.

Mathew (6:24) maintained, “no man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. “ but his masters in that context were his God and mammon, I am confident drawing and writing are far less opposed ideas.

I am inspired to again begin to blog here after stumbling across a post by a blogger I used to enjoy following. He did not blog particularly regularly but his essays were always a joy to read; well worth waiting for. Last year he posted once in January and again in February. This year he has posted twice in January since when there has been nothing. I wait in hope but am most grateful to him for shaking me out of my torpor and encourage me henceforth to discipline myself to make further occasional excursions into words.

To All Visitors to This and to my 'Engaging Right' Blogs

Yuletide Greetings!

“. . . The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove; from every part of which, bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney, as that dull petrification of a hearth had never known in Scrooge's time, or Marley's, or for many and many a winter season gone. Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy state upon this couch, there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to see, who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty's horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on Scrooge, as he came peeping round the door. . . . .             .

`I am the Ghost of Christmas Present,' said the Spirit. `Look upon me.'

Scrooge reverently did so. It was clothed in one simple green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. Girded round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.”

From, ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens 1843

Over the hills . . .

Yesterday morning, close-packed marble size raindrops falling heavily on the roof-light above my bed brought me to another day of consciousness.  It seemed to be a day better suited to driving than exploring local lanes on foot but by mid-morning when we were ready to leave the house the rain had ceased and warm sunshine beat down from a large patch of blue sky.

Back in May, when we were staying near Skibbereen, Lisi and I met there artist Kathy Pentek and each of us left her with a commission; one painting for myself and several for Lisi.  Yesterday, dawning inclement, we chose to drive across the peninsular to pick up our commissions.  I had left Kathy with a more or less free hand, my only constraints on her imagination being that the painting should have something to do with my birth-sign; Capricorn.  Kathy’s painting delighted me.  I can but be amazed at how an artist, having spent no more than an hour or so with a total stranger, has managed to produce a painting which has created so much impact on my senses; in a way, I see in this painting a fractured mirror of myself.

The mid-morning sunshine did not endure.  In swirling mists under a heavy, grey, marbled sky, sharing the landscape and road with no more than downs of insouciant sheep, we drove over the gorgeously spectacular Healy Pass.  Concomitant with the heavy rain earlier in the morning was the gushing, streaming, seeping lattice of mesmerising waterfalls and rivulets flowing down and over steep hill and mountainsides.

The three hundred metre high Healy Pass is named after Tim Healy, an early governor of the Irish Free State.  Previously called ‘The Kerry Pass’ the road was built during the famine years of the nineteenth century by poor relief workers.