Slow mornings

Slow mornings are for waking up to birdsong and not getting out of bed straight away. Of lying still and listening to the chorus.

It starts with one plaintive call, a single note. A moment of silence, then an answer. Now a handful (or feather-full) of small trills, like a vocal warm-up, make gentle music for the dawn.

And then at the wave of an unseen conductor, the entire ensemble bursts into song, a thousand avian voices turning the valley into a kind of amphitheatre of chirps and dings and trills and gurgles and caws and tweets and shrieks and twitters and songs, mostly songs, that celebrate the dawn.

It is impossible to sleep, but on slow mornings, there’s no need to leap out of bed. Slow mornings are permission to stretch first, twist, yawn, and when you’re ready - only when you’re ready - soft-foot into the kitchen to fill a kettle and boil some water.

Slow mornings begin with steaming cups of tea cradled on laps, in old comfy chairs under light-filled windows, where an entire chapter of a favourite book is read at leisure.

We have rented a little two-bedroom cottage on the edge of a walnut farm and when I make my way into the kitchen, the ghost of last night’s fire haunts the air like a toasty hug.

Ralph hears me and ambles over for a cuddle, his eyes still puffy with sleep and wild curls shooting in every direction. We don shoes and coats over our pyjamas and sneak out for a pre-breakfast walk, just the two of us.

The path at the front of the cottage is thick with onion weeds in bloom (which looks a lot better than that sounds), and we tip-toe through starlike flowers in the dew to the tree lined edge of a dried up creek-bed. Follow that to the edge of the orchard, where I carry Ralph over the cattle-grid, balancing precariously with each step, and set him down among row upon row of walnut trees, just beginning to bud.

Cold air, birdsong, a little hand in mine. In the distance, the Victorian Alps, forest green since the snow melted a month ago.

We walk in silence for a little while, if the ever-enthusiastic chorus of a thousand birds can be considered silence, before Ralph wakes up enough to start telling me stories. Once he does though, then stories don’t stop. Long, convoluted, nonsensical stories about games concocted in the playground involving superheroes and villains and clever inventions and magical powers.

Then he breaks off mid-sentence, and we freeze where we stand. Ahead on the path, a glorious, red-gold fox pauses and stares back at us. Time is suspended: the fox, Ralph and me floating like motes in our own little time-bubble made of golden morning light.

Until somewhere in the distance a cow bellows, and the spell is broken. Released, the fox turns and disappears among the walnut trees but before we can move, another crosses our path at the same place, pauses to watch us, then runs after its mate.

Ralph skips ahead, collecting walnut buds, river pebbles and wildflowers, until he notices something in the grass and calls back at me. “I think I found where the fox sleeps!”

I catch up, and he points to a big, round patch of flattened grass. Bed for a cow, not a fox. There are flattened grass-patches all around us, and a hefty sprinkling of still-steaming cow-pats on the path.

We tread more carefully now, not wanting to step in what the herd left behind, and Ralph invents a new game: “Pat-Man.” We hop sideways and forwards but never diagonally, saying “bleep! bleep!” Walnut flowers are power-ups (without them, we slow down or stop) and the ultimate goal is to reach the next cattle-grid and find our way to the river.

We win. The river is deep and green and still, made for picnics.

On the way back, we finally find the herd. Fat, peaceful cows, grazing under the trees. When they spot us the mothers call anxiously for their babies, who skip over to them, and the whole herd ambles away into the shadows.

It’s a slow, gentle amble, not a race to escape. Cows like slow mornings too.

(There’s a little video below so you can join us among the walnut trees. If you can’t see it, click on the title of this blog post to view it in your browser, and the video will come up).