There’s a hare in the shape of a ball, neck deep in its furry back, sitting in the grass facing our neighbour’s front door. It looks like it’s waiting for something. Just next to it is a very small spindly bush, not yet in leaf, possibly not even alive. Soft rain drizzles over the hare and it seems content.
In my mind I imagine it’s waiting for our neighbour Aina to return. She was the kind of neighbour you hope to find in a new place – characterful, outspoken, short on small talk. Not the kind that is happy discussing the weather, smiling at you through clenched teeth as if you were her best friend, but someone who tells you how it is, and doesn’t care what you think about it.
We have many stories to tell about our encounters with her – about her ability to speak her mind mainly. When she hadn’t seen us for a while she’d ask us if we’d been at home ‘counting your money’. She had a good view from her kitchen window of our entrance. She kept an eye on all the comings and goings in the bed and breakfast, and knew what our guests had been up to, when they’d arrived and when they left, and was happy to report on them to us later.
She cast a beady knowing look at us when we first arrived and claimed to like snow, and said nothing. Later that look came to haunt us, when we were cursing the endless need to shift snow from our driveway. She displayed a stoic acceptance of the suffering brought by the summer insects, listing the relentless arrival of each variety from June to September, ensuring a full season of torture for all of us living here. She was born and brought up in a village nearby, and stoicism was the way to cope. She gave us advice on things in the garden and showed us how to leave a mound of hay for hares over winter.
One day we were with her in her kitchen, watching our guests leave the house. It wasn’t until half an hour later we realised we hadn’t brought our key and the door was now locked. We realised if we could reach her son in town we could access the internet, find the guests’ phone number, and call and ask them if they could come back and let us in. But it was minus 16 and we had no outdoor clothing with us. No problem, Aina, announced, beckoning us down her stairs into the basement, where she opened a creaky old door and revealed a clapped-out looking old car, which we’d never known about. She handed us the keys. And so we found ourselves on a bit of a wild chase across town, and later out of town, to locate our guests, but that’s another story. . .
We nearly fell out with her when her pigeon-feeding reached epic proportions and our area was swamped with defecating birds morning and evening. ‘They also have to eat’, she wailed, in a kind of mock defence. She transferred her feeding area to the other side of the house and the problem was switched to her other neighbours.
When she died we felt the heart had gone out of Kiruna. During her last year she never left the house, and her son planted some bushes she could see from her kitchen window. We could imagine her response, and gratitude was unlikely. I guess she said it was pointless and a waste of money, but being a dutiful son he did it anyway. Sadly the bushes never thrived, and every year after her death there were fewer and fewer of them.
You have to be tough in this environment, so one shouldn’t be surprised, but also one of the main threats to new growth in bushes is hares, who just love those fresh young shoots. We’ve seen them nibbling away at them – only a little bit, but very often, and this way, over time, a whole bush can disappear.
This morning there’s a hare there, sitting next to the one remaining bush, in the rain, waiting. No doubt Aina had another goal in mind when the bushes were planted, and it wasn’t getting something to admire in the garden. ‘They also have to eat!’, comes to mind. The hare is waiting for some more.
