foxes in my garden – little cotton rabbits

Words have been eluding me a little lately. Toby has been going through a bad patch behaviourally and I'm feeling a little tired and depleted. Happily Spring is now in full swing and the progression of colour throughout the countryside is providing many small delights. Being out with my camera always lifts my spirits and I hope these photos are a pleasure for you to see too. And Kit visiting again is such a joy. She's been here once or twice a week and is no longer pregnant so hopefully there are some healthy growing cubs hidden somewhere safe nearby. You can see in the second picture of her that part of her belly fur has gone, I've been trying to read up on whether it's related to her recently giving birth – maybe kind of a 'brood patch' as the cubs can't temperature regulate for the first 3 weeks of life. If anyone knows the answer please do let me know.

Progress is being made with the horse pattern but it's slow going at the moment as we're now in the Easter break from college so I'm not getting much time to work on it. Hopefully I'll have something ready to show you in a few weeks time.

Hope that you're finding some small delights in your days too, J x

January is often a quiet month for me and I'm grateful to be able to be able to slow right down and take everything as calmly as possible as I make my plans for the year. Especially so this year, because for a little while now I have been been feeling rather down and becoming at times overwhelmed with anxiety, so as a way of trying to cope with that I've decided to start a 5 year journal and record all of the positive and beautiful things to remember from each passing day. I think that I am very lucky because it is so often the smallest of things that do lift my mood and bring me joy, and once you start to actively look for these moments you find there are actually quite a few in every day. But such moments can often get forgotten and overshadowed by everyday life, so recording them is a good way to bring them to mind when I need to feel brighter.

So far I've jotted about red kites soaring over the house, goldfinches and robins in the garden, Toby's laughter, Amy's smile, H's hugs, the taste of a good cake, the delicious feeling of sitting in bed and knitting away a weekend morning, the quiet calm of a gently flickering candle, the glory of sunrises, the delicacy of frost, the gentle balm of music *, and the delight in deciding to finally use a much loved skein of yarn from my stash – this one has been treasured for almost 10 years and is irreplaceable as Asti of Juno fibre arts is no longer creating her beautiful yarns, so I'm enjoying some very careful pondering of what project to cast on.

But above all else there is has been one totally unexpected, unbelievable and utterly delightful moment – the return of Kit the fox!!

It has been over a year since she was last here and I had written here on the blog that she might have died – I secretly feared she had been run over on the main road as there have been a few fox corpses at the roadside in the intervening months. But no, we were joyfully so very wrong because on Jan 13th she sauntered nonchalantly into the garden, as though she had just been here a day ago, sat down by the garden table and looked expectantly at me through the kitchen door. I have never had a jaw-dropping moment before, but I did then. A snack of Toby's cocktail sausages was swiftly found and as I approached her to put them down, still slightly disbelieving that it really was her, she stood up and approached me, confirming without any doubt that it was. You can see from the pictures below that she's a little more scarred about the muzzle than when she was last here but otherwise is looking well nourished and cosy in her thick growth winter coat. I suspect that she is pregnant and has come back because it's been especially cold recently and she's has difficulty finding enough food. She's arrived every evening since, just after darkness has fallen and I am so utterly overjoyed to see her again, and she's featuring heavily in my new journal of happy things 🙂

I hope she sticks around for a while longer and I'll be sure to bring you further news of her if she does stay around. If you are interested you can see the story of how we became friends and see my previous blog posts of her visits over the last four years here.