Adjusting

Cold air breezes into my home through the window I’ve opened. I savour it; it smells fresh, damp, earthy. Birds have begun to chirp, sensing the coming day. The sky has barely begun to lighten, but what little light there is glistens off the dew clinging to the blades of grass.

I am not normally an early riser, so this scene is not a familiar one to me. I usually wake when the sun is high in the sky and the morning dew has long since dried. I sleep late; I am more familiar with the constellations than the grey morn.

Today, however, I slept lightly, and when I heard the birds begin their song, it did not feel like I had been sleeping at all. I slipped quietly out of bed, wrapped myself in my flannel housecoat, and stepped out onto the creaking, ancient hardwood to the front room.

Everything feels different in the morning. The day feels new and full of possibility, but also lonely. Living in a countryside cottage is quiet all the time, but somehow, I feel more isolated in the morning. The world feels like it is mine alone, and it is a feeling I both like and don’t.

We moved here to get away from the world, my husband and I. It’s the perfect place for him to write and for me to paint, undisturbed by sounds of cars and construction and screaming neighbours. It was a shock to our system, at first. Instead of the sound of sirens, which we had become accustomed to, we were awoken by the yipping and screaming of foxes, more unsettling to our ears than the sound of someone else’s emergency. Wind rustling through leaves replaced the roar of wind through high rises, and we found that rain falling on our shingled roof differed greatly from the splatting of pouring rain on sidewalks and streets. Still, though, I sometimes miss the chaos of the city. I look over our front yard, misty and grey and alive with the sounds of birds, and find I’m still not quite used to it, having all this land to ourselves instead of our tiny apartment with a potted balcony garden.

It is starting to become greener here now; the snow—so white and fluffy compared to the greyish brown slush in the city—mostly melted earlier in the week. The pond in our front yard is still frozen over, though we sometimes hear a crack as the ice thaws. It’s a large pond, one that takes over a quarter of our large front yard. We moved here just six months ago, when it was covered in snow, and the only reason we knew it was there was because our real estate agent told us it was. I don’t know how deep the pond is, but I picture it a small lake. Little wooden boats lie at the bottom of it in my mind; an old doll, preserved as if in a bog instead of a human-made pond, sits in the boat, surrounded by other lost toys. Seaweed floats eerily up from the bottom, thin green fingers reaching up to the sky, not seen by those above the water, waving and lurking in the dark. These thoughts unnerve me, and I think them every time I look over to the pond.

I had always wanted a cottage in the countryside to live in, to grow gardens, to have a room to paint in and a small forest to go for walks through. I would look out my high-rise window overlooking a grey city and long for nature, lamenting the fact that our day jobs kept us in the city. When the pandemic hit and our jobs turned remote, we still stayed in the city, waiting for it to end. It didn’t, so eventually we became members of the masses leaving the urban life for more isolated homes, away from people and disease.

I thought I would instantly love it here. After all, it’s exactly what I had always wanted. It’s beautiful, cozy, picturesque. A forest lies behind our house, winding with trails cut by previous owners. Flower gardens adorn the front and back of the house, though right now, they are full of lifeless brown plants, and a large vegetable garden lies out back. But instead, I felt afraid of how isolated it all was. I pictured someone breaking into our house, no one hearing us cry for help, even though we have neighbours just 100 meters away. I pictured our deaths, our bodies dumped into the pond outside, sinking to the bottom to get tangled in seaweed. I couldn’t sleep until the early hours of the morning, waking well into the day. This habit has been hard to break.

I am not quite so afraid now. I am adjusting to our new life, and I am beginning to find comfort in our home. I know which boards creak the loudest, which window I like to paint in front of, which trails take me through the prettiest parts of the forest. I no longer have trouble falling asleep in total silence and total darkness, and I have come to appreciate the quiet sounds of nature awakening from the winter’s chill. I look forward to our life here; I have already planned what vegetables to plant in the garden, and I have begun to map out changes in the garden layouts around the house.

The sun has now risen above the horizon as a curve of electric orange, alighting the yard in a golden glow. It’s startlingly pretty; it even lights up the giant pieces of ice floating on top of the pond. The ice cracks loudly, as if sensing the sudden burst of sunlight and the coming spring. I decide that I want to be out there, to feel it for myself. Slipping on a pair of rubber boots, I step outside and feel the sun hit my face. It blinds me momentarily, and I turn away and walk toward the pond. As I get closer, I see tiny snowdrops have sprung up on our lawn. They quiver cheerfully every time a drop of dew slides off of them.

The pond itself is still covered in a thin layer of ice, clinging to the last moments of winter like the small piles of snow beneath the trees and bushes around it. The ice will melt soon, though. There are more large chunks of ice floating on top of than there were yesterday, aimlessly bumping into each other and waiting to dissolve into the depths. Soon, it will thaw, and maybe I'll be able to see down to the bottom of the pond.