I’ve lost my roof, yet I remember rain. Back when the thatch was thick on me, woven strands of stick and straw. The rich, rising reek of petrichor. The water flowing from my height in rills and rivulets.

 

I’ve lost my windows, yet I remember sun. The baking heat on my brown skin, drawing moisture from within. Hands, caked in clay, pressing warmth between ribs: reeds and rushes, snags of wool, soft and lanolin-slick. The rhythm of the work itself, patted and trodden, laughter and smoke and the suck of bare feet in mud.

 

I’ve lost my door, yet I remember welcome. Fire burnt to ash and built again. The benches beside it, the stories told. Cups filled and shared and overflowing, famines borne out with sheer grit. The comings-and-goings of man and beast, of broad-shouldered women and clucking hens, the babes born to my earthen womb taking their first steps outside.

 

It is quieter now on my windswept moor. Just me and the birds that nest in my shell, their dwellings small versions of what I once was: mud and straw and strands of wool, bundled and baked in the sun. Mice huddle in the crannies left where the cob has crumbled away.

 

And sometimes a child comes to play, small with tatted hair. Creeping through grass like a curious hare, eyes bright with wind and small wisdoms. He does not speak, but he knows me: walking low walls like a balance beam, arms wide and bare feet sure. He gathers treasure with grubby hands: brown wool snagged on thorns, a stream-washed stick all white and worn, clay from the curve of the brook.

 

He sits and plays in my shelterless nook, smearing mud on stones. Pressing thumbprints into clay, binding and bundling reeds. He whispers only to himself, a language older than speech. He stacks and shapes and breaks and binds, and remembers things long past.

 

The child lays his palm on my hand-smoothed walls, and rising to the touch, I give him warmth, just barely felt: a century’s sun stored in my bones. The echo of fire that centred this space, the life that made one room a world.

 

The child simply nods, and unravels a thread of red wool from the scarf around his neck. He presses it into a crack in the wall, then skips off into the sun.

 

Time does not move forward here. It loops and curls like smoke. Snow dusts lintels, melts, grows moss. And one day the child does not come. Years pass, or don’t, and lichen creeps. Birds fly South and nests break down. Yet fledglings grow, remember, return, to rebuild and reproduce.

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I stand still in the gyre of it all, shaped to be stronger than time. The wool in the walls, it holds me. Like tendon to bone, like earth to earth, it anchors my story here.

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And then one day there are footsteps - not tripping and light like the child’s. The heavy, deliberate tramp of boots and crunching undegrowth. A young man, wind-chapped, red and quiet, the straps of a canvas pack. He stills before my doorway, like he’s stepped into himself.

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He crosses the grass toward me, fingers trailing the drystone wall, and bends to unpick a tangle of wool from where it has caught in the hedge. He kneels at my threshold with ritual care, and unwraps his pack on the ground: a knife, a trowel, water and reeds, clay from a stream-smoothed bed.

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The house remembers, and the land. The surge of time, and clay-streaked hands. And like the martins coming home, my time will come again.