Lá Fhéile Bhríde, St Bridget’s Day

Unfortunately the photos from this old post have been lost

Happy Bridget’s Day

I have been happily hibernating since Solstice, very much enjoying the “cut wood, carry water” lifestyle of the old days, although it is more like carry turf-briquettes, collect water in my neck of the woods. The really severe weather which started before Christmas got us into a routine of doing basic chores and cutting back on energy expenditure, really hibernating.

The important jobs were cleaning out and relighting the stove, filling our water containers each day because our water pipes were frozen, carrying in the day’s fuel for the fire from our outside store, feeding the birds and making sure the cats had fresh water to drink a few times a day because the water in their bowl would freeze quickly and so on.

We learnt a new way to manage the fire in our stove so as to keep some heat all night long and to be able to clean the stove without removing the live embers and so relight it with the remains of the night fire. Keeping a large pot of water on the stove at night was also important as that meant that we had warm water in the morning to defrost the gas cylinder so as to cook breakfast and we also had some nice warm water for a morning wash – ah, what luxury!

We didn’t go down to town often because we had stocked up with food to avoid unnecessary journeys. The few times that we did venture out on the road we often met the postman and collected our mail and that of our neighbours and then we would deliver it to the neighbours on the way home. The postman was unable to travel on our road because of the snow and the constant freezing conditions. It was nice for us to have that contact with our neighbours which we might not have had otherwise.

We walked every day and were enthralled by the tracks of the wild animals in our area. Each day we could see the new tracks and were surprised by how much one local fox travels across our land and also delighted to see mountain hare tracks. It’s like being let in on a secret world. These animals all exist here along side us all the time and we rarely see glimpses of them. We felt quite honoured to have been made privy to their comings and goings, thanks to the snowy and freezing weather.

So now the cold weather is well and truly gone and I find myself slowly and reluctantly trying to re-enter the world of schedules, grocery shopping, cyber world and forthcoming elections…..

Lá Fhéile Bhríde shona dhuit