Christmas Morning Diptych

Scotland

Christmas morning 1995. Like any other day back home, I awake to the sound of my mother outside, shovelling coal from the bunker to the skuttle. The rhythmic, alternating sounds of the scraping shovel and the tumble of coal lumps have been my morning wake-up call all through my childhood.

Still in bed, I picture her, heavy coat pulled over her night clothes, slender legs hastily planted in winter boots, bent over the coal-bunker’s dark mouth. She’s heading back in now with the coal but will be out again to empty the ash and then back in again to bank up the fire: the first task of every day.

The light coming through my bedroom window is a matt, bluish white; a sign there may have been more snow overnight. The dog is downstairs and pacing around after my mother. The sound of her insistent trotting and scuttling underfoot propels me out of the warm cocoon of my duvet and I begin the ritual of layering up my clothes. Then downstairs to rug up for the outdoors. The dog fusses and sniffs around my face and boot laces as I try to tie them up: eager to help; inadvertently hindering.

At last I step outside. More snow has indeed fallen. Yesterday’s footprints are now shallow dips in an infinite white blanket that seems to roll out all the way into the sky. After the fall, a further drop in the mercury has petrified the scene. Everything bears a frozen crust, from the top of the Feshie Ridge over the valley, to the laden shrubs before me in the garden. Everything feels closer on days like this. Distance and sound are shortened, muted, flattened in the still air. It’s almost as if I could step over the shrubs and onto the top of the Ridge in one stride. The air is full of that metallic taste and smell that promises further falls of snow. Each tree branch, each power line has been re-etched, thicker, with a icy topping. A low sun glows faintly behind this monochrome backdrop.

The dog is already leaping about, all four paws off the ground at once, and into a drift, emerging with flakes clinging to every whisker. Her excited barks muffled and swallowed by the landscape.

Kerrow Dog: 1987-2003

My steps crunch through the top layer of ice to the squeaky snow beneath. On our way up through the village, we pass through the low hanging, acrid fug of coal- and wood- smoke: the only sign of life. Having escaped from the village chimneys it has nowhere else to go. Our walk takes us past the Gynack, gurgling quietly under a lid of ice and snow. The odd crow takes wing from a tree branch prompting a brief shower of powder. Deer and rabbit tracks and perhaps those of a hare lead away from the golf course fairway into the Douglas fir plantation. The Monadhliadh lie hunched and pensive up ahead. I realise I can no longer feel my face. Time to turn home.

La Pie (The Magpie - the European Sort), Claude Monet 

Musée D’Orsay, Paris

I know this isn't Scotland but it is one of my favourite winter landscape paintings 

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Australia

Christmas morning 2015. I awake, and become aware of the heat of a sunbeam. It has sliced through the gap in the bedroom curtains, cut the bed in half, and cast itself all the way up the opposite wall. The noise that has brought me out of slumber is from an insistent magpie on the balustrade of our front deck. It has an almost human whistle at times in between its reedy chortling which sounds like a cross between the bird equivalent of a muttered aside and someone accidentally stepping on some kind of musical toy.

The house is still quite cool but the intensity of that sunbeam and the creaking in the roof beams suggest it won’t stay that way for long. Outside the bedroom door the dog stirs and snorts through the fly screen at the magpie. Her claws are clicking frenetically on the hardwood floor in outrage at this avian infringement. I swing my legs over the side of the bed and throw on a cotton shift, my movement prompting a renewed tattoo of canine claws. Getting up I open the fly screen to the front deck of the house and the dog bursts out just as the magpie flies off to the safety of some overhead cables.

Cassie Dog 

Before the mercury climbs to 30 degrees, I need a coffee and the dog needs a walk. I set the espresso machine going and throw on just enough clothing to maintain public decency. The dog fusses around my feet. This amount of movement is a promising sign. Spraying sunscreen over my exposed skin has her backing off briefly.

I step outside. The tiles under my bare feet are still pleasurably cool to touch. But the crickets have already started to chirp faster. They’re working up to their summer chorus which will build throughout the day. With the help of their cicada cousins the sound should reach the outside edge of hearing by early evening. This is the sound of bright, intense heat. It is early still. The fresh sky an uninterrupted royal blue: the only thing yet to be sun-bleached in the landscape before me.

We set off through the suburb, past sleepy houses, the whirring and gurgling of air conditioning units the only signs of life. Once off-road, my steps crunch over scorched grass and baked gum leaves. The eucalypt scent intensifies as the warmth builds, slowly replacing the musky smell of possum. Brilliant, white cockatoos screech and swoop across our path to land in an expansive gum tree with a twisting dappled trunk. We reach the banks of the lazy Yarra. The river slides slowly by under the trailing branches of red-gum, slipping past beyond a veil of flickering leaves. The dog upsets the scene’s tranquility, leaping into the river, emerging at my side in a shower of muddy water. Within ten minutes we’re both dry again. It’s now 29 degrees. Time to turn home.

River Red Gum - Robyn Collier

http://robyncollier.com.au/