The Mole Day

The Old Smithy, Challacombe, Exmoor, Devon

by Lian Brook-Tyler

Once upon a time, I devoted a day to tending a dead mole.

I was nine or thereabouts and at this point my father and I lived in an old ‘converted’ (slight embellishment, that) blacksmith’s barn set on the edge of the wilds of Exmoor, Devon.

The Old Smithy was owned (or maybe rented or borrowed - in fairy stories like these maybe it’s all the same) by a soulful man named Allen. I delighted in the way the gentle, almost Elven spelling of his name captured his being so beautifully.

He was an artist from Canada who told me tales of faraway places with improbable names like Vancouver.

We lived there, commune-style, with a trickle of people, waifs and strays like us, who lived in the hinterlands of knowing better than the folk from the land of proper jobs, mortgages and shiny cars and knowing nothing but love and art.

This day, The Mole Day, must have been during a period when there were no other children living in The Old Smithy so I spent much of my time alone, exploring our wild garden and the fields beyond.

To a child, moles are mythical creatures, hidden in the dark, creators of mysterious, miniature hillocks. Not something one expects to see outside of picture books.

Yet, there it was, replete with midnight velvet and gnome’s hands.

And that midnight velvet was showered with hundreds of white stars of a fly’s eggs.

Hour after hour, I plucked out those eggs. I don’t know now if I was hoping that enough love would bring the mole back to life or whether I was simply moved to restore its beauty, even in death.

As the daylight slipped away, the mole remained dead but its pelt was returned to its rightful inky black.

I hollowed out a resting place in the soft soil next to the stream, my small human hands imperfectly doing the work of the mole.

I nestled it down for sleep, placing flowers and blessings upon it. And then trailed away, tears on my cheeks, my heart broken open, a day well spent.

Now many years later, I still think of The Mole Day, pondering what it meant.

I see clues in Mary Oliver’s poems, especially The Summer Day and especially the final four lines...

“Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

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