This was the rather lovely site where we were volunteering. I could hear crows above (and spoke to them a few times - just in case) and saw them flying high... but none to make friends with. We also saw a heron, a cormorant and some ducks and swans. Suzy thought she could hear a willow warbler (some small brown thing, I suspect) and the robins and magpies were noisy but invisible.
The task was raking up a rather excessive amount of vegetation and then either carry it to large piles or load it into a trailer pulled by a rather hilarious tiny tractor and then unload it again at the pile.
I did quite a bit with the tractor - Dan drove and Leslie and I were, as the kids say, his bitches. Actually, he did a lot of the forking on and off the trailer as well as the driving. But what was cool about this was how we operated as a team. Like, occasionally, he'd get on the tractor and be about to pull forward, but wait until we'd finished putting on a fork-load, then pause and we'd just rock up and load there and then he'd drive on... it sounds really dull, but the thing was that we didn't need language to organise like this. Or when we undid and redid the absurdly heavy back of the trailer, two of us synchronised. it just all worked without speaking.
This seemed really cool to me. How easy it was to just co-operate on a shared task. To know what needed doing when and how to help and how to pair up or move away and so on.
I think this has been the best thing so far - that realisation. And the bar was high as I genuinely love this volunteering.
Must say that when I start, there's always this awkwardness about what I am doing and is it right... this sense of uncertainty and aloneness and stuff. But then you just merge into the work somehow and are not a person but part of a process....
I look like I've been in the tropics - it was so sunny. September! And better than August was. I don't want the cold and the wet. But it's coming.
Still, Laurence says that the winter work is the best....
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