A Case of the Mehs

I take myself off for a late afternoon walk to blow away the cobwebs. A case of the mehs has me under a blanket on the couch, scrolling through Twitter and I hope this will help.

I bundle up in a coat, boots and a favorite blue, woolen scarf. After a week of glorious weather, full of tender white pear blossom and warm days, we’ve had days of snow and freezing temperatures. The blossom froze and turned brown and I ate too much cake.

But the sun is shining now despite the cold and I force my feet to walk across the road from my house to the Great Lawn Park. I walk down the gravel path, avoiding the other walkers and head for the narrow way through the cattail marshes.

I walk fast, the cold stinging my eyes and wind catching my breath. I focus on getting my heart rate up to burn through my calorie goal for the day.

A red-winged blackbird calls loudly as he flies over my head and lands delicately on the rounded tip of a cattail.

I stop and the words of a friend come to me. We are sharing ideas for coping during the quarantine and he tells me he is trying to slow everything down. He makes his morning coffee in his old cafetiere, lingers over breakfast, sits in the sun with his eyes closed. I look out over the marsh at the blackbirds dotted along the tops of the cattails. I listen to their songs as they defend their little patch of marsh, waiting for the females to arrive and set their nests above the shallow water.

I have been very dismissive of this park. In The Wild Remedy, Emma Mitchell fights the black dog in the Cambridgeshire Fens. She walks the wooded paths and spots wood anemones, oxlips, honeysuckle, swallows, muntjac deer, wild roses and meadowsweet like a modern-day Titania napping on a fairy bank.

The Great Lawn Park is a reclaimed reservoir and acts as a flood control area for this little patch of the city. It’s mostly wild grasses that stay brown and dry for much of the year. The cattail marsh gives off a swamp smell that peaks in the hot summer months. A man-made creek runs through the park, occasionally foaming worryingly as trash bobs at its edges.

But today I slow down and look closer. Snowmelt feeds tiny patches of miniature purple wildflowers hiding among the brown grass. The blackbird’s bright shoulder patch of yellow and red flashes across the rushes as he sways, singing his song. The path turns pale green. The wind blows away the swamp smell and there’s just cold and fresh and clear.