January’s cautionary snowdrops open in the lee of a stone wall; they are as white as splashes of wood pigeon droppings under their roost tree, as white as snow that has not yet come. Instead the day is bright and smack-in-the-face cold. Yesterday it rained and smelled of damp sheep; tomorrow will be different. There are emergency sirens on the main road, several: something bad has happened. There is the wave-rumble of a passing aeroplane, going somewhere under a waxing, gibbous moon. There is the clacking of jackdaws in tall trees, agitated by something they take as a warning. All this is swallowed by a north-westerly breeze.
A stream passes through culverts underground and can be heard flowing beneath iron inspection hatches in the road. Yesterday’s rain, the flush from fields, ditch trickles, spliced into a watery hawser dragged through clay and limestone down to the brook, through red roots of alder to the Severn, “a stone fountain weeping out my year”, as John Donne wrote in his poem Twickenham Garden.
January is cautious about the passing of time and at this end of the year has more to lose. The robins, great tits, song thrushes – they ease themselves from sub-songs into the shine of day on the shoulder of wind but are still circumspect. There is something lodged in the birds’ syrinx, close to the heart, hungry and stern, that holds them back; their evening half-song is now half familiar. Catkins hang stiffly, anticipating bad weather, reluctant to let loose their golden clouds of pollen yet; light catches in the hazel’s metallic sheen. In the black buds of ash, purple of birch, bronze of oak and red of hawthorn, the leaves are wrapped tight around a punctuation mark in a story yet to yield.
“You’re a caution!” once meant you were astonishing or amusing; January’s character is that: fugitive and odd. I dreamed last night that I was given a handful of white pills and swallowed them without thinking, without asking why. The pills were like snowdrops in the lee of the wall, returning as they always do in the comedy of weathers. As it darkens now at five and the forecast is uncertain, owls call the January cautions.
