Heart dreamcatcher and feather on a foot

The wind has finally gone round to the west, so the dreamcatcher I hung in the hawthorn at the wood's edge has stopped knocking against the gate. You asked why I bothered with a thing made of willow and cotton when the Coombe road has a perfectly good gatepost. I still think you're daft, but I went and fetched it down this morning all the same, because the web had torn at the heart where the willow bent back on itself, and I wanted to mend it before the rain.

Mrs Pardoe from the shop says her boy found a jay's feather lodged in the same hedge last week, grey-barred and blue at the tip. I went looking for it myself on Tuesday and found only a rook's, which I suppose is what you get at my age. Still, I tied it under the loop with the green wool, and it turns slowly when the air comes off the water, the way a hand does when it's thinking.

I haven't told your mother what I did with the old heart frame she gave me at Christmas. I bent it to the shape of the one hanging on the gate and wove the spokes tight, the way Dad taught me, though my fingers are slower now and the spider had to be shooed off twice. It sits in the window now, facing the trees. When the light comes through it at four o'clock, the shadow of the web lands on the kitchen table like a map of somewhere we used to walk.

Come up Sunday. Bring your boots, not the good ones. The feather needs a second pair of eyes.

Love, Gran