Hi,

how are you all doing? I am so glad that we have reached the equinox….the days are now longer than the nights and all the spring bulbs are up. We have masses of daffodils in the woods, crocuses all through the lawn and the blossom is out down by the stream. I think Spring has gone to the dogs’ heads, they have been razzing round the garden barking and playing games. It’s been Gwen and Mali mostly, but even the old lady Dilys has been joining in.

There have been more changes than just the plants waking up. We have a swallows nest in our front porch and I have a suspicion that when the swallows return from Africa they will discover squatters in their nest! There are a pair of wrens (like in the picture) busy every day,collecting nesting materials like horse hair, moss, leaves and tiny sticks and filling in the top of the nest to make a cosyburrow, getting ready to lay eggs and nest. Swallow nestsare a bit like a teacup shape, made from mud and stuck high up to the wall. The wrens are adding a soft mossy lining and a thick warm roof, all ready for nesting. Wrens are tiny birds, they only weigh about 7-10g. I must admit, I’m very excited to see baby wrens hatch right by our kitchen window because they are one of my favourite birds.

The hills round me are full of the noises of nature waking up. We have fields of lambs bleating, the birdsong is beautiful and at night the foxes are barking and calling for mates. This almost makes up for the soggy fields, the mud trampled into my kitchen, more rain and bathing the dogs, as you can guess Mali in particular, almost daily! A friend of mine messaged me the other day when she got back in after a day of looking after all the animals on her farm and said she was actually going to dissolve if any more rain fell on her….I think that might mean she’s a goner because it is still raining!

Look at that picture! Mali came back from a day on the yard with my son in that state. They had been sorting out a drainage pipe leak at the bottom of one of the fields, then moved one of the storm damaged trees that had come down and all sorts of other bits of work that mean spaniels soak up most of a field. It took ages to get her clean, as usual. Then she slept the sleep of an exhausted but happy spaniel, in front of the kitchen fire, making squeaks, snuffles and little wuffly barks.

I probably ought to introduce you to the cat in the photo. Meet Ahsoka, my daughter’s kitten. Yes, that’s right, she’s only 8 months old and HUGE! I have a grey cat called Betsi, she’s the cutest little menace, but she is about a quarter of Ahsoka’s size, about the same size as her tail. Ahsoka is a breed of cat called a Maine Coon. The theory is that they were bred in the State of Maine in America and the first ones were the babies of a cat crossed with a raccoon. I used to live in America, just north of Boston, a house right by the sea. We used to have raccoons raid our bins every night, they were so loud and clumsy. Ahsoka doesn’t look like any raccoon I have ever met but, wow! she’s clumsy! I don’t know if she will grow out of it as she gets older but we will watch her making a decision to jump up onto the chest of drawers where Betsi’s food is (up there so that greedy Gwen doesn’t steal it). She will line herself up, wiggle her bottom in readiness, take a huge leap…and face plant into the front of the chest of drawers! She then face slides down the front of the chest of drawers, lands on the floor, dusts herself off and tries again, usually with the same result. She falls off things, trips over things. She often sleeps in a basket that is on the blanket chest at the end of my bed and always forgets where she is when she wakes up. She does a huge stretch, the basket falls off the chest with her weight and she lands on the floor with the basket on top of her. When we are downstairs in the daytime we will hear a massive thud from upstairs, look at each other and all say ‘Ahsoka!!!’

My daughter got Ahsoka, and named her after her favourite Star Wars character, after she did a big deterioration in her health and found it more difficult to leave the house. She also, knowing that she may not have a huge amount of time left as she is receiving palliative care, didnt want to leave Carrie her assistance dog without a friend. She was worried that because Carrie is always by her side and even goes into the hospice with her, she would fret and pine when she goes. So my daughter got Ahsoka on Carrie’s birthday, as a birthday present for her. It worked! They adore each other. They play together, wash each other and curl up to sleep together. My daughter has a hospital bed to sleep in, a single bed…and trying to fit herself, Carrie and an ever-growing cat into the bed is becoming challenging. It seems that Maine Coons keep growing til they are 3 years old and she is still only 8 months now! I’ve put a picture of Carrie opening her birthday presentnext to this. It’s not a brilliant quality photo but it was difficult to get a good photo because Carrie was just so excited.

I am having difficulty sorting out getting into Berwyn at the minute. I’ve had some difficulties with the medication I have been trying out…it doesn’t seem like its going to work for me and I’m having to come back off it. Also, there are issues with my eldest daughter’s care that I am going to have to sort out before I can come back. I’m really sorry that you can’t meet together at the moment but I am working on it and in the meantime will keep on haunting you with these Blitherings!

I’ve just come in from a walk around my garden and the fields, there’s a really cold wind but the ground and trees are alive with new growth. The nettles are springing up around the edge of the field. Under the trees by the stream smells strongly of the wild garlic plants and the lawns are beginning to grow fast. I’m hoping that all this new growth won’t be knocked back too much by the cold weather we are going to have. It was nice to get outside without it raining for once. I invited Dilys, my old sausage dog, to come with me but she just snuggled further down the blankets in the basket next to the stove and her body language said a very loud ‘No!’. Mali would definitely have been up for it but I wanted to get this letter finished to send to you and I knew that if she did come with me, I would be scrubbing spaniels for the rest of the day.

I’ve been making big plans for the garden. A load of my son’s farming friends, and my son as well, have chainsaws and a huge amount of overgrown evergreen trees had to come down in the garden and around the land. They were getting huge and had been planted in the wrong place. They have brought most of them down now but it’s taken a long time to get all the tree trunks chopped up and processed. It is nearly done. When its clear we are going to get a digger to it and scrape back all the years of conifer rubbish from underneath and to flatten the land out. Then I am going to plant some fruit trees, apples, pears and plums, so that I can use them for cooking, and plant lots of snowdrops and daffodils underneath.

We need to get a digger in to make some changes in the farm yard anyway, my son has cleared some land and wants to put up new sheep pens. He’s going to use the money from the sale of the sheep, they’ve all gone now, to get some work done. He still hasn’t had a day off, I thinks its about 6 or 7 weeks now. He’s finally finished lambing and he’s just catching up on all the jobs that have been missed in the busyness. I think he’s got a day off booked for the 5th April and I’m fairly sure he’s going to spend it sleeping.

Right! I better get this sent off to you otherwise I will miss the deadline for it getting printed and out to this week. I really hope to see you all soon.

Blessings,

Elizabeth