I had had one of my two hour long ‘wide awakes’ in the night, when I got up for a while to make a hot chocolate, talk to the cat a bit and then read some poetry until I felt calm enough to go back to sleep. I picked out a book my daughter had bought me years ago for my birthday years ago. It was after I had told her by email what I was reading from the local library, whilst on a training holiday in Florida staying with one of my age group friends on the USA team. It had been recommended for me by my friend’s husband, who had taken me to the library with him that day. The Poetry of Robert Frost, it’s a full works book about two inches thick in paperback. I loved it then and I love it more than any other poetry book I have at home. It sits on the shelf close to my bed and my desk, fluffy with little coloured paper markers all through it for quick access to my favourites.
As I picked up the book in the night, I turned to poem called Mending Wall, that I have read so often, then instead of picking another favourite from a marker I read on from that point, the next work was titled The Death of the Hired Man. This is more a story than a poem, although it is line numbered, 166 lines in total. Frost can do no wrong for me, I love every word. This work is six or seven pages long and by the end I had lost any stress that may have woken me in the first place, and so I returned to bed and fell asleep immediately. Then the next thing I knew was that unusually I had overslept. Steve was up and watching TV.
After a short discussion about the weather and what form our exercise would take, Steve thought that we would still go and have a little run up in Angmering Park where we so often go. We had both looked out of the windows at both ends of the house and it did not look anything like the Carol the weather lady on TV had said, indeed, it was quite bright. We would be too late to catch the sunrise though.
Ten minutes later we were in the car dressed in our run kit, much the same as usual except I had decided not to wear a hat. I prefer not to, whenever possible, my argument is always that I have masses of thick curly hair so and being stuck indoors so much, it was nice to let the wind blow through my hair and freshen it up a bit. Steve and I were both feeling tired, he because he had had a hard day of work the day before, and me because I was awake half the night. So, Steve thought we had better stick to a brisk walk for a while and see how it went. When we arrived at the parking place the sky had clouded over and; believe this or believe it not, but the very moment we got out of the car it started to rain quite hard! We got back in.
Steve thinks that I am too long in the tooth to deliberately get soaked to the skin and I have long ago conceded to that idea. We both had a laugh about the rain and tossed ideas back and forth as to what the next move was. I didn’t want to just drive home. Steve thought we should listen to the radio a moment or two and see how it looked, maybe it would pass over. A little while later he started the engine, saying that it looked lighter over that way nodding his head toward Arundel, so off we went. He drove to the village of Burpham and it was dull but not raining, though only a few miles away.
We kept to brisk walk pace and strode onwards, which is also upwards from that point and had a really nice walk together. My husband is such an angel and to my never-ending joy, he actually seems to like me as much as I like him. We never stop talking when we are together and are mostly in agreement, although even when we do not agree, we don’t get into arguments we talk it through whatever it is.
He asked me what I did whilst I was awake in the night; he knew about it because I told him, not because I had disturbed him, he sleeps the sleep of the dead. I told him that I had spent the time with my friend Robert Frost and went on to tell him what both of the poems were about and that although I was familiar with one, that I did not know anything about the second and so told him the story in my own, far less than perfect words of The Death of the Hired Man.
Our walk uphill and our gentle jog downhill that day began and ended in a tranquil church yard. The pretty, daintiest, though hardy snowdrops, were in flower.
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