Please Slow Down

This morning I went for (another) walk in the rain, wearing my raincoat. Down the bottom of the hill , where our road meets the road to town, I saw a couple of swamp hens bustling in and out of the tall grass that grows around the wetlands, the swamp as we used to say. The clouds cleared for a moment and the grass  suddenly lit up as if from inside, with dewy rain drops sparkling and flashing like a tiara in a chandelier-lit ballroom. . 

The swamp hens are goofy yet dignified-looking charcoal coloured birds with beautiful deep blue chest and wings and a sort of red blob on their heads that goes into their beaks. This morning one of them was just stepping out from her world of reeds & long grass, like a well-groomed housewife, pausing on the threshold with a shopping basket.

I love hearing the honking of the swamp hens echoing up the hill to our house. And the cows mooing, and the frogs croaking and the night insects tinkling: the soundtrack of our little neck of the woods. 

I thought of my neighbour N. and how deeply upset she is about  seeing dead birds on the road, killed by speeding cars. I watched the bird plod delicately across the road and  saw how easily it could happen. The swamp hen is a slow moving creature, and not a great flyer. 

N. and some others have erected small memorial crosses by the roadside to mark the places where birds and animals have been killed. Swamp hens, wallabies, bandicoots, echidnas, snakes, turtles have all died on the road in recent years. My neighbours are campaigning to reduce the speed limit. 

Why do I - and most of us - find it so hard to just Slow Down? In our cars, our thoughts, our lives. Even when our pace is  life-threatening, to both our own and other species. 

Last week in the writing class I gave the students an exercise: Write about the death of a person or an animal ( concrete sensory detail, hold back on the emotions abstractions & adjectives etc)

Several people in the room had lost siblings in motor accidents. As they read out their stories half the class was in tears. I guess that is how N. feels about the birds and animals.  

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Not humble swamp hens (haven't got any photos of them - it's been raining too much)... but stately white peacocks, mincing about like ghostly aristocratic brides on the lawns of the splendid Italian gardens surrounding the palace on the island Isola Bella in the middle of Lake Maggiore, Italy. F& I were there in July.