Lockdown Lemonade

When the world gives you lockdown, you don’t have much choice other than to make the best of it. Combined with the New Year resolutions to get fit, sunrise at 8.45 am and hard frost, and it’s a pretty potent combination.

Sunrise is my favourite time of the day, especially when it’s so late that you can have a good night’s sleep before having to face the dawn. It’s one of the major (few) perks in winter to living so far north. Since September, I’ve been going for a dawn walk. It began as a challenge for that month to get my body-clock into shape after the first lockdown, late nights binge-watching TV and summer holidays. Two weeks in and I was addicted to the dawn.

Even rainy days, which were surprisingly few, didn’t put me off. I take the weekends off and have a lie-in. The worst weather always seemed to fall on Saturdays. I still enjoy snuggling down in bed and listening to the rain outside.

As autumn trundled into winter, I adjusted my walking time according to the sunrise. This week, I’m doorstepping at 8.15 am so that I’m out in the fields to meet the first rays around 8.45. On clear days there’s still plenty of light in the half-hour of twilight before dawn. Yesterday morning with a skiff of snow and some fog, it was a little darker.

The photos have been effortlessly spectacular with the frost and snow.

There’s a flooded patch in one of the fields that that has turned to solid ice. I call it the secret ice rink. It would probably be a muddy eight to ten inches at its deepest point, but the ice is so thick right now, I can walk all the way across. Even so, there’s a substantial adrenalin rush when the ice creaks beneath my feet.

With yesterday’s snow, the secret ick rink was less slippery and perfect for making snow angels.

Frost and snow change the landscape, so you feel like you are viewing somewhere new, somewhere different. It’s natures gift to help me not feel so locked down, as if I’m travelling to a new place each day on my morning ramble, giving me renewed connections to nature. Aren’t these rabbit’s tracks so cute? You can just picture the little guy hopping about…

Another thing I did this past week to make me feel less locked down was to change the position of my bedroom furniture. I turned the bed 90 degrees so that it was against another wall. It really worked! The whole room looked so different, we felt like were in a hotel for the night. I even had that first-night-bad-sleep I get at the beginning of holidays. With my side of the bed so much closer to the window, I was sure I could feel a draft, and so the next day we switched everything back and ‘came home’ again. We’ve also changed the positions where we sit at the dinner table… but that was because I needed space to do a jigsaw this week

Perhaps I should turn some of my pictures into jigsaws!

I may have taken down my Christmas decorations this week (apart from the solar lights on the fruit trees outside) but nature is still in Christmas decor mode.

And frozen blossoms add a splash of colour to the pastel landscape.

To help alleviate my lockdown, I’ve tuned in to Yoga with Adriene. I like her quick daily 30-day-challenges, and the current one is themed ‘Breath’ – most apt at a time when so many are fighting for theirs.

So we may have left 2020 behind, but we are still suffering from its hangover as events this week have demonstrated. But take heart, the dawn always comes and brings us a brand new day. What we do with it is up to us, lockdown or not.

Stay safe.

Byddi Lee