Time, Wind and Melancholy.

For much of the walk tonight I found myself remembering with great vividness a dog I had back in the 80s, a beautiful Border Collie who died of a malignant tumour at age 4½. It was so vivid that I sensed again how much I’d loved her, and felt again the grief at her leaving, and was touched again by the sting of guilt for all the times I’d scolded her, perhaps unfairly. Why would all that come back so strongly after twenty nine years?

This happens to me occasionally, and I wonder whether time, in all its mystery, sometimes carries us across a shaft connecting us with an earlier episode, so we hear the echoes of what happened then, and smell the smells, and sense the senses. And I wonder whether there’s some reason why we need to be reminded.

*  *  *

The wind was beginning to rise while I was out. We’re promised another storm through tonight and tomorrow, the third this month. Three deaths were attributed to the one that hit us on Monday, and then there are the people who’ve been flooded out and others who have spent Christmas without power. It’s unusual to get three storm systems in one month, and the howls of the current one are circling the house and filling the chimney cavities as I type. I find the sound both mournful and menacing these days.