The Doorway

And other midwinter vignettes

As the year draws to a close, this is a short post and an experiment. After a couple of narrative essays recently, I am trying out lyrical vignettes for size. Although I’ve long been interested in the form, I was prompted to give it a go myself by reading

Summer Brennan

’s excellent essay on vignettes.

Your comments are welcome, as always!

The Doorway

It’s December; I’m in the year 2023, facing a new one marked 2024. It’s September; I’m on a street, standing in front of a door overgrown with vegetation. The door is unnumbered and looks like an abandoned entrance. I recall that the Spanish word for threshold is “umbral”. The word partly derives from the Latin “lux,” light. But it always reminds me of the Latin word “umbra”, shade or shadow, which I learnt in school. The door’s gloom beckons. The other origin of “umbral” is the Latin for threshold, “limen” and this place feels liminal, incipient. The year, though scheduled and numbered, gives fewer clues and less encouragement. Will it be a time of transition or of stasis, of fulfilment or disappointment? It’s in a sequence, which feels like order and clarity, but the future it symbolises is haphazard and guarded. If I open the numberless door, it could lead me into... A garden? An orchard? A castle with a sleeping beauty or an empty lot? The nameless threshold clamours with possibility. But the year, emblemed and impending, stays mute.¹

Sheep in winter (I)

It’s December in Devon. The sheep are out in the field, and snow begins to fall. The flakes come down heavily and urgently, without their usual hesitancy. If we leave them out, the sheep will not suffer from the cold, protected by their heavy fleeces. But as they shelter from the wind beneath the tall hedges, there’s a risk they’ll get buried overnight under the drifts. So we gather the flock and hunt for stragglers in the quickly blurring landscape. They appear like ghosts out of the gloom. Before the snow, with its extreme clarity, we saw them as white. Now they’ve turned the colour of the creamy milk at the top of a churn². The wind whips at our faces as we follow the last ones along a single track, out of the now invisible field, and into the barn. 

Sheep in winter (II)

Another farm, another winter. Here, near the coast, we never see snow. Out on the English Channel, the wind drives careening white horses towards the shore. On land, the winter wind is experienced as an assault on the senses. Night has fallen, and the ewes lie out in the field like fallen clouds. The cold has surprised us. I run across the night landscape, looking for new-born lambs, desperate to take them to a warm hearth before the chill can claim them. I scan the darkness. In my distress, I mistake white stones, scattered across the field and cold as tombs, for lambs. I stumble up the hill, cursing the darkness. Then there’s a lamb, cold to my touch but trembling, its tiny heart still beating. I bend to scoop it up and lead the bleating mother across the flinty pasture, towards the house. 

And finally

I’d just like to add that I remain truly grateful for your presence here, and I wish you all a fruitful and fulfilling 2024. I also look forward to sharing more experiences and experiments with you in the new year.

1. While I was preparing this, I came across a reference to the "Dioscuri” in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. I didn’t know this name for the twins, whom I knew as Castor and Pollux from Greek and Roman mythology. As a twin myself, I plunged down the rabbit hole and found that the symbol of the Dioscuri was the “dokana” which looks like a gateway. Which led me to this: “Like the posts of the gateway, the Dioscuri or human side-posts may have stood as guardians between two worlds, protectors of the living, companions also of the dead”. https://www.jstor.org/stable/497365?seq=18

2. Wikipedia tells me that “in North America, this is often referred to as a milk can.” The milk from our farm used to be picked up in churns until bulk tankers began to be used in the 1970s.