hide and seek

I drove my daughter to re-register as a home-care assistant this morning. She had an interview for her old job, the one she had before she went off travelling to South and Central America for 16 months. We had got her home from Rio 3 weeks ago after a few scares and now she has isolated herself sufficiently to work again. She wants to work, to be of help.

While she was being interviewed Archie (my dug) and I went for a walk around the industrial estate where the offices were. It was run down and even emptier than usual. Massive lots were overgrown with bushes and trees and plants. Archie danced and sniffed among the refuse and fly-tipped piles of household cast-offs.
Around and around we went with the diluted traffic still making a fair rattle and rumble over the Kingston Bridge just behind us. I followed some goldfinches from tree to fence to wire to bush. Wee streaks of bright colour and song. A willow warbler teased us in a game of hide and seek and won.
Round and around we went some more, for an hour in total. Each time around I focussed a wee bit closer to the catkins, the seedheads, the budding spring among industrial decay. It felt good, the sky was clean of contrails. That warbler still wanted to play. The goldfinches dipped and rose over our heads calling like wonky wheels of a shopping trolley.
The photo is a back door panel where the knots in the wood tease something hidden, something hiding what is inside. I responded to the grain of the wood against the pattern of the covering. Archie was close sniffing himself, responding to something among a heap of litter.
The phone went and it was my daughter, finished and ready for us all to go home, back to our isolation. The world gets smaller; more intimate. Slowly we are finding our pace in this new rhythm of the world. In isolation there can be found freedom. May everyone discover this.