Keeping quiet

I dig in the gar­den with my part­ner. At dusk we wan­der the farm. Some­times we talk. We ache with age and labour, but we press on, gladly. We have a lot to do, much to plant and a great many things to ab­stain from.

We stop here and there to make time for the vis­ceral, to sense what is real, what we need to feel. There are fresh tracks at the na­ture cross­roads where the bad­ger, fox, boar and deer pass.

A nightin­gale ser­e­nades in the wal­nut tree, loud­est of all the song­sters. We are knee deep in clover, mal­low, hawks­beard, pop­pies, vetch and more. Pol­li­na­tors bounce from one bloom to an­other. We don’t think we have ever seen so many flow­ers on the olive trees. We don’t need the Servei Me­te­o­rològic de Catalunya to tell us a storm is brew­ing.

An­other storm. A year ago we were con­tem­plat­ing the cost of hav­ing a sec­ond water well drilled. Our spring had stopped run­ning for the first time dur­ing our two decades here and the old well was all but dry. I sank a solar pump into the spring shaft to draw what lit­tle was left. The farm was parched, our vital olive crop in doubt.

Now the spring runs re­lent­lessly again at 1,000 litres an hour and the cir­cu­lar reser­voir, home of fish, frogs, and so much more, brims, a mir­ror of the gath­er­ing clouds.

Storm Glo­ria kicked off this thun­der­ous year in Jan­u­ary, you may re­call, when the Ebre Delta all but dis­ap­peared be­neath the flood. Time and time again rain has pum­melled the red earth of our lower ter­races, rush­ing into the storm drain and down to the river. After Glo­ria the empty pantà dels Guiamets, vil­lage home of hero­ine Neus Català, was rapidly re­plen­ished.

It is be­wil­der­ing, fright­en­ing, to feel the forces of na­ture. It makes me deepen my want for knowl­edge, to draw from the well of our col­lec­tive sen­sory his­tory, when early hu­mans did not have books but could read the sky and the wind, knew the mean­ings of bird and an­i­mal cries. It is faint, but we all carry the trea­sure of for­got­ten wis­dom.

The biggest pic­ture is what is around us, what and who mat­ter to us. Yes, the de­ranged ut­ter­ances of Trump and his ilk, and des­per­ate tolls on the dark­est of news days are soul-de­stroy­ing as­pects of this new, pan­demic re­al­ity. We feel com­pelled to watch and lis­ten to vac­u­ous, un­apolo­getic politi­cis­ing, when the glar­ing im­per­a­tive, in spite of the dire eco­nom­ics, is to wait for the sci­ence to catch up. The hard but glar­ing truth is that no­body should be put at risk until we know how to pro­tect, yet many al­ready have been.

So we seek as often as we can to ab­stain from this tor­rent of con­jec­ture and table thump­ing, to be as quiet as we can. Noth­ing adds up fi­nan­cially. One child made it home from uni­ver­sity, the other is locked down in Asia.

We must bide. And we will.

A great deal can change in the course of a year, and it will again.