Kidney with Greek text on the ribs

The frost has held the yard for nine days now, and the ewes are lambing in the barn with the paraffin heater ticking beside them. Dad still won't let me near the tractor on the ice, so I've been doing the accounts instead, which is how I found Grandad's ledger wedged in the bread bin. He never trusted banks, as you know. Inside the back cover, in his square capitals, was the phrase you taught me from that Greek phrasebook you carried round the lambing season: μια ζωή. One life. Beneath it he'd drawn a bean-shaped field, dotted all over like frost on stubble, with a tangle of ditches branching out of one side and a single outfall running off the tail end, every channel labelled in pencil as neatly as a vet's diagram.

Mum says he made that map the winter the Witham flooded the low meadow, and that the Greek was just him showing off to the seed merchant from Lincoln. I didn't believe her. There's a last entry, dated the week before the funeral, and it's only four words: Clear the outfall before thaw. Don't let it sit. I thought he meant the gate, or the hay, or something sensible. Then I walked the low field with a torch and found the outfall choked solid with reed and silt, the water standing in the middle of the field like blood that can't get back to the heart.

So this morning I took the crowbar out before light. The ice cracked under my boots like someone breaking biscuits, and the first pull of mud came up grey and stinking. I worked until my hands stopped feeling like mine. When I finally pulled the last clot of reed free, the water gave a sudden gulp and ran off down the dyke, clear as tap water, shining under the sun coming up over the Wolds.

I've pinned his map above the kettle. Come home at Easter if you can. Bring the phrasebook.

Love, Nell

P.S. The ewe in pen four has twins. We've called them Ditch and Outfall, which Dad says is a poor joke, so I'm sure they'll be fine.