Houston, we have evening 2013

I’m such a daylight-lover that not having an evening really depresses me. Going from light to dark with ne’er a goodbye is just something very sad. I love that time when everything slows down and the sun melts into the horizon. It’s the first sign to me that the Winter is dead. You can actually do productive stuff without feeling like you should be in bed. Having the shutters still open at 6pm – delicious.

Not only that, but there’s actually another joyous little ray of light (no, not Madonna) coming into my life every day. I usually wake up about 6.30ish. I don’t know whether it’s me waking Heston up or him waking me up, but as soon as I’m conscious, I’m conscious of a warm breath right near my face. The room is pitch black – the shutters see to that – so the only way I know it’s nearly morning is Heston’s dog breath. Tilly would sleep all day I think. She snores right through even when I’m properly awake. However, I think that there’s something nice creeping into the bedroom – a little ray of light under the door each morning. It is wonderful to open the bedroom and see that the sun is beginning to lighten the world a little. Some days I think I just fester in darkness. It’s too cold to open shutters and opening them from 9am – 3am is so pointless that most of my village don’t bother. I don’t really either. This year has been one of the darkest winters for ages, apparently. It certainly felt like it. There certainly didn’t seem to be as many of those bright and frosty days as there have been in the past here.

It was that grim, it was almost Mancunian.

Sorry Manchester.

It’s true though.

So, to have an evening, to have long sunsets, to have mornings where it seems to take a while for the sun to break through the haze, it’s all good. Yesterday, the sun was so bright that I could barely see when walking the dogs.

However, how quickly we forget the grievances of warm weather. A fly came in the house yesterday. It really pissed me off. Can’t I have one day where I open the windows and a beast comes in?! Plus, I can’t leave windows open as the chickens fly in. Maybe I need nets over the windows? The flies are quickly dealt with by the uber-efficient Catch strips which are deeply unpleasant but highly effective. The chickens, not so much. They come in for the dog biscuits, as far as I can see.

Cheeky chickens.

They’re back at full lay now, and how lovely it is to be able to give away eggs to friends. I have more friends than eggs, however, so I have to kind of portion them about wherever I’m going if I’ve got spares.

The chickens like the evenings as well; they sit on the windowsill sunbathing and cuddling. It’s kind of sweet. I like peaceful evenings like that.

It’s nice too, since most evenings I teach from 4pm-late, depending on what day it is. It’s nice to finish and have a little left over and still feel like I could do something if I wanted to. I don’t really, since I’m usually worn out, but it’s nice to be able to think I could if I wanted to.

And, just because I knew I’d had this reflection before, I went looking for it. Indeed, on March 9 2011, I realised I felt just as excited about the oncoming evening. I should bookmark the post for the middle of winter when it seems like the days will never brighten up. Still, the last time the sun got up so early was September, and the last time it went to bed so late was the end of October.

I’m obviously going to have to control myself or else I’ll be breaking out into song here and there.

But I don’t care. I’ve waited a long time to see the sun get so warm (it’s three whole months since it was so warm in the day! We had two days in mid-November that crossed the 15° mark).

So, today I am breaking out the big guns. It’s rotavator time! After that, all hell breaks loose in a frenzy of planting and crazy gardening chaos.

I’m going to enjoy the quiet before the vegetation storm while I can!