Waning new moon sitting with Venus the morning star as she releases her third vestment
I bring chestnut cake and medlars and milk to the bronze age burials on the hillfort the morning after Samhain eve. An orange ladybird (Halyzia sedecimguttata) sits on the cairnstone with me. She talks about unexpected joys that will find me, which I have longed for. This makes me cry. She’s a native ladybird, looking for a place to hibernate in the ash leaves all over the mound. When I get up to leave, she leaves too.
Ordinary red ladybirds are everywhere. They land on my sleeves, they come hide in my curtains, looking for winter warmth.
Wild Dartmoor hill mare bellies are starting to grow with babies conceived in June. They will be born in May.
Rosehips and hawthorns have reached fever pitch. They bead November red.
Oak leaves are turning yellow
Beech leaves are turning amber
Are the tiny hazel dormice fat enough for hibernation yet? Are they making their winter nests, little weavings of grass and leaf, and curling up furry-tailed in the deeps of the hazel bushes? How many of them are left here? I dreamt of a hazel dormouse the first night I ever slept in Devon, on the soft sweet earth in a bell tent on Dartmoor when I was 26. It was running through a hazel hedge in my dream. These days, I like to imagine every single one of them at the same time, sleeping all across the hedges of Devon. Each a votive, a light, the hazels full of tiny luminaries. Bless them bless them bless them protect their homes and their lives, may they flourish.
Orion is fully back in the night sky again, climbing up into the cold sometime after ten o’clock, as the church bells ring it.
I imagine the Year’s Wife is up the hill singing with owls at night these days. She’s in secret places in the oldest hedgerows, the ones that go back to the time of Celtic field boundaries, checking on the dormice. In the morning more leaves have fallen, and the owls are resting in their secret day-places. Then the Year’s Wife takes up with the doves and wood pigeons. They sit on the peak of the barn roof which I can see from my desk window, cooing and swooping about all day, always returning to that roost together eventually.