Year’s progress

We went for a walk above Burn o’Vat Saturday.

It was the first day of the Easter holiday for many folk hereabouts, and it was also the First Hot Day of the year—it was at least 20, which around here is positively sweltering. I was quite pleased to have persuaded the entire Savage Tribe into our trusty car (though I admit to moments of frustration along the way) and I even remembered to hand out motion sickness medicine before we left. Coming up Deeside through Aboyne it really felt like a proper outing, and when we actually arrived at the Muir of Dinnet it was clear everyone else had thought of the exact same place! No worries: after a visit to the Burn o’Vat itself we ambled up onto the muir and along. As we were climbing we passed an isolated wood anemone (Anemone nemorosa).

The flowers are marking time everywhere, even if the schedule feels a bit disjointed as the rhythm of the seasons slips out of sync. There is coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara) on Donmouth beach that bloomed a month ago, and the butterburs (Petasites hybridus) are all over the path there now. The earliest fumitories (Fumaria officinalis) have come out at the top of the staircase leading up from Balgownie Road by Cottown to Scotstown Gardens.

Time marks us all. Hakunica is having a very hard time with long walks now; we very nearly lost her again just at the end of our walk, but once we realised she was missing I was able to retrace the path calling for her and when she did appear we were all very relieved. Her woolly legs were shaking and I had to lift her into the car. Our car has not been so lucky, though. Monday was her MOT and she failed in a terminal way. The rust that has been eating her has become too widespread to repair. The scrappers will come get her in the next few days. So no daytrips in the car until we can replace her, and no more exhausting walks for Hakunica.

We’ve become spoiled in this last year, what with finally having a car. The freedom to take stuff up to the tip, to go fetch boards for a project, to go for an outing in the countryside, to offer a child’s friend a lift home—it’s all part of normal Aberdeen expectations, and it does make life a lot easier. We got lucky being given a car, even if it required well over a thousand pounds of work just this year. Now we will have to sort out the finances and figure out some way to replace it with something much more reliable and long-lasting.

It’s much harder to renegotiate your relationship with a dear member of the family when they get old. Hakunica has been a reliable gobbler of scraps, extra ears and eyes on walks, a bit of tactful moral support. Now it’s no scraps, a short but vital walk, and she comes to find me twice or thrice a day asking for a stroke and some time. She certainly still barks, and I’ve no doubt she’d spend what strength she still had if she thought there were a real intruder; but she’s uncomfortable even with the painkillers she’s been prescribed (Meloxicam – vulture-friendly NSAIDs that I used to take for my shattered ankle in Nepal!) and prefers to sleep outside on the cool grass in the sun during the days now.

Scotland is not yet at the stage where Philip Dick and Donna Haraway collide, where our well-bred but skint scrap of a social unit could afford to replace bits of the dog (or the car) with adamantium and wetware. We all still evolve and erode, grow and die all at once across the minutes or years. On a far larger scale the planet’s ecosystems are collapsing without replacement under pressure and that cyborg dream of transhumanism looks like its hubris has been hamstrung by free-market demolition of the only ecological matrix we ever had. At the scale of our family, though, we can embrace our mutualistic temporariness with compassion.