Passing

The little bay

I took the dogs to the headland this morning.
The tide was right out, the little bay awash with seaweed, the water thick with seagulls.
The smell of the sea was so intense, it caught me in the back of the throat and sent me spinning through the years, to other days, other beaches, other dogs. Memories of another lifetime, it seemed, way back when time wasn't measured because it didn't matter.
Those days didn't feel like thirty years ago, but they did feel as if they'd slipped beyond reach.

Time changes as you get older. It is no longer a haphazard, generously proportioned patchwork, a kaleidoscope of shifting possibilities, an empty frame in which you are creating the picture.
It becomes mean and sly and penny-pinching. It stands at your side, licking the end of its pencil and noting everything down. Nothing slips by unremarked, and one way or another, everything must be paid for - even though the hours it measures out to you slip through your fingers like water.
But it's only when the past comes swooping back to grab you, that you realise how much everything has changed.

I found myself walking through the rough grass aching for days and people - for eras - that will never be again.

But it was a blue morning, calm and quiet, the sun warm on my back.
The headland horses came to say hello as we passed on our way to the lumpy dunes where the dogs love to race, or lie in the grass and ambush each other.

The headland horses come to say hello

It's probably the miniature hills and dells that make the headland so exciting for them. Whoever is playing the hare can never quite tell if she's about to be caught.
And it was only when I got to the top of the highest lump and looked back, I saw that one of the mares has had her foal. The tiny, dark creature was standing close to her, still wide-eyed at this world of mornings and evenings, of sunlight and starlight - too young to realise that all these things are just marking the passage of time.

Later, the tanker-man came to deliver heating oil. We stood in the sunshine and exchanged news. He always knows far more of what is going on than I do.
He was looking pensive as well, despite the spring weather.
'Someone up the road killed himself, this morning,' he told me.
I'd seen an ambulance, going past our gate - a rare sight in this quiet place.
Shocked, silenced, I didn't know what to say.
Tragically - in this quiet place - it seems to happen more and more these days.
'You never know how it is with people,' he said, eventually.

You never do.

Caught Napping

I love winter, but by now, it always seems to have gone on for an incredibly long time.
It's been wet, cold, windy and miserable for as long as I can remember.
And I can't wait for Spring - probably the most eagerly anticipated season of the year.

But the same thing happens to me every year.
Suddenly one day I realise that Spring has been and gone and done it's thing while I was - well, what was I doing?
Waiting, I suppose.
Anticipating


How unappreciative is that?

Viburnum Bodantense flowers all winter, bless its cotton socks

It's not that things pass me by. I always notice.
The snowdrops start first, often before New Year even and then, too early for their own good, the first tiny, fragile little violets peep out. The viburnum Bodantense continues in full throttle, despite having been flowering since October, and then the blue, blue flowers of the delicate anemone blanda appear. And - suddenly - wham, bam, everywhere you look, weeds are popping out of the ground like jack-in-the-boxes - or should that be jacks-in-the-box?

The orchard blossoms

I think, deep down, I am waiting for bugles and trumpets and a massive fanfare. For an Official Announcement on the Today Programme, a banner across the sky proclaiming: 'Let it be known - Spring has arrived!'

So brief, so beautiful

Instead of which, with horror, I suddenly realise that we are into the Pheasant's Eyes - the very last of the narcissus to flower; that the camassia are over; the tulips are blown; the leaves are opening on the first of the big trees and that the brief, wondrous moment when I thought I was in control of the garden has flown for another twelvemonths.

So this year, bearing Jeanette Winterson's words in mind - 'the time is now and the place is here and there are no second chances at a single moment.' (quoted just a week ago in my post, A Heartbeat), I am determined not to let it happen again.

It helps that I have been out gardening like a fiend. I have been trying to tame my herbaceous border which has run rather wild this last year or two.

Not a pretty sight

Hugo, our lovely Frenchman, got me going by (effortlessly) digging up the thugs for me, and helping me replant them in the new, whimsically named Moon Garden, where, as far as I'm concerned, they can fight it out between themselves.
Now I am gradually working my way along the bed, clearing it, dividing plants, removing weeds, and generally improving everything's living conditions.
A slow but rewarding process.
And even though it's still only February, a week of sunshine has brought everything on so fast that I am only just in time - another week and some plants wouldn't appreciate being uprooted at all.

Getting there - slowly

Model Dog and the TeenQueen have been a big help.
Model Dog is an old hand, but gardening is new to SuperModel.
She has taken to it in a big way.
Lying on the grass, soaking up the rays and reducing vast marrow bones to matchsticks is just what Tiggers like best.

So, Spring - HELLO!
Nice to see you!
Please make yourself at home, and hang around, who don't you?
Have a cuppa - in fact, have two. Or a glass of wine. Let's make a celebratory cake! There's really nothing else I'd rather do than keep you company.

The spring is sprung, the grass is riz,

I wonder where the boydie is?

They say the boyd is on the wing -

But that's absoyd!

The wing is on the boyd!

And if you don't believe me, measure the height of your lawn tonight and then measure it again in the morning!

A bouquet of loveliness

A Candle for St Jude

It is the most beautiful day.
The sun is shining, the sky is blue and although much may be wrong with the world, all is well for a moment or two. It is the sort of morning when you can't help walking around singing.
(The dogs are used to my voice raised in song, and are happily tone deaf.)
We set out for our early constitutional with a light heart.

The first outing of the day involves Top Dog and Under Dog pottering round checking that everything is as they left it last night.
For Model Dog, it is quite a different matter.
To start with, shaking with excitement and the pent-up springs of the night, she does a kind of vertical take-off that never ceases to make me laugh.When we reach the bank beside the orchard, she levitates, tucks her hind quarters in and then, while in mid-air, achieves a kind of turbo-charge which propels her up the short flight of steps without touching any of them. From this vantage point she starts her Isle of Man practice run.

I confess, I have mixed feelings about her circuit training - rather, I imagine, as TT spectators do. I love watching her motorbike-madness, and her sheer, joyful exuberance; but being a lurcher, she runs so fast that all I can think of are the endless obstacles in her path. Trees mainly - and fences. Benches and suchlike. Cats and hens, and the senior dogs who are past the age of youthful folly and don't appreciate being bowled over.
Not to mention me!
She is a fan of the close-shave.

Model Dog is just a blur

This morning, when she eventually reached 100mph, Top Dog and I took refuge behind the young horse chestnut tree.
Through its bare branches I watched her lapping herself, until I started noticing the branches themselves.
They cast a shadow over my pearlescent morning, because the young horse chestnut isn't just bare, it is dead.
I'm used to them looking dead.Horse chestnuts get quite a hard time of it here on the west coast. They insist on coming into leaf way before the other trees, and in consequence get hammered by the harsh north winds that blow - without fail - at some point in early May. I wish they would adjust their timetable, but perhaps that will take a hundred years or two.

The trouble is, they might not have a hundred years or two to play with.
I don't know very much about tree diseases, but there seem to be a lot of them about.
My poor old elm trees finally succumbed last year - just when I thought it had miraculously escaped Dutch Elm Disease - and we cut it down last winter. It seems very hard that we now have to face losing another species.
I don't know if my horse chestnut has died of the leaf-mining moth or bleeding canker, but probably the latter. There are nasty, dark rivulets down the bark that look like the trails of bitter tears.
It is a sorry sight.


In London there are many, many horse chestnut trees.
In the park where I used to walk with my small son and our dogs, they abounded and in spring looked like overdone Victorian Christmas trees with their wonderful profusion of candles. In autumn our walks became slower and slower as my bewitched eighteen-month old gathered as many gleaming, auburn 'carcons' as our communal pockets would hold.
He was fascinated by the smooth, perfect, polished roundness, even though he couldn't pronounce their name. Who could blame him. I was fascinated myself. Conkers are to have and to hold, and each new find, plucked from the leaves or its spiky nest, promises to be the one, the very one, that will never lose its new-minted gleam, its plump fullness.

Life was a walk in the park

It's hard to imagine autumn without an annual conker bonanza. They have have been part of my life ever since I moved to the Northern Hemisphere. The road we lived in was lined with statuesque trees and my mother - daft, dear woman that she is - used to post boxes of conkers to my young nephews in Scotland. We did try to convince her that horse chestnuts probably grow in Edinburgh just as successfully as in the south of England, but later, when my own son was smitten with conker-fever, I understood the need to share that particular bewitchment with small grandsons who were far away, and without a chestnut tree of their own. I remember stopping to admire a small, hidden chateau in the middle of nowhere in France. While we stood looking down the avenue from the gates, we lost track of our small heir for a few minutes, but he wasn't far away, and wasn't missing us at all. He looked like a miniature version of Father Christmas's sack - bulging all over, utterly content, picking up every conker he could find and stuffing them, squirrel-like into the pockets and pouches of his clothes.

What will small boys do without conkers?
Forget small boys. What will I do without conkers.

Smitten

Someone told me a year or two ago that conkers exude something repellent to spiders, and if you want to keep the eight-legged invaders at bay, distribute conkers liberally around your house.
I gleefully brought in every one I could find and deposited them in clusters here and there. I even posted a few under my bed in the sure and certain knowledge that spiders would never more darken the inner sanctum of my personal space.
Oh joy.
But a few weeks later I woke up in the middle of the night. That sudden jerk into wakefulness that leaves you wondering warily what roused you.

It only took me a second to realise exactly what it was. A mouse was feasting on the banquet I had so thoughtfully provided just a foot or so beneath where I lay.

When I woke the In Charge to inform him, he was at his most withering.
'What did you expect?' he said, looking at me as if I was slightly simple.
After much internal debate, I removed the conkers - what was left of them - from under the bed.
I put them on the window sills.
Unfortunately, the mice were not so easily disposed of.

Now, it looks as if I will no longer have the mouse v. spider dilemma.
It looks as though I will no longer have the conkers. Or the beautiful candles in spring.
Back in London, all those years ago, as autumn drew to a close, my small son succinctly summed things up in terms he understood. His father - like many fathers - was a weekend treat. The rest of the time, the In Charge went off to work before his day began and returned after his bedtime.
On the sad day when no amount of sifting through the crisp, brown leaves revealed another conker, he straightened up, his little face a picture of resignation.
'Carcons gone work,' he said.

I wish I thought my horse chestnut would be back at the end of the day.
Sadly, blue skies and singing notwithstanding, I am not optimistic.
Another case for St Jude I guess. I understand he's the patron saint of lost causes.
If he's got time. I imagine he's rather busy these days.
 

Oh, September...

Having spent all morning pondering blue moons, I was planning to go out and do some gardening this afternoon, but much to Model Dog's disgust, a sullen rain set in after lunch, so we have ventured nowhere.
A shame, as the list of gardening jobs is growing exponentially with the passing days.

I am not very fond of autumn.
There - I've said it, and will now run and hide behind the cupboards in case you all pelt me with rotten apples.
Most people love autumn, but I am not one of them. I hate the coming of September, which the In-Charge always takes personally, as he is a Virgo - his birthday was just last week.
If I lived in France it would be different.

I am as one with Joseph Addison who wrote in The Spectator on 31 May 1712:
'Could I transport myself with a wish from one country to another, I should choose to pass my winter in Spain, my Spring in Italy, my summer in England and my autumn in France.'

Autumn in France is glorious and beautiful. As I'm sure it is in countless other places. Italy has many fans (including my friend DodoWoman), and everyone knows Connecticut is famous for its 'Fall'.
But autumn in this neck of the woods is wild and mean. The leaves get blown away before they have had time to turn - even the Virginia Creeper is green one day, red the next and gone on the third.
And on top of that is is damp, cold and full of spiders who suddenly think they can move into any part of my house they fancy.
They cannot.
I have nothing against spiders outside. They can have the woodshed, the henhouse, the turfshed, the garden shed - any wretched shed they want, but they cannot have my house - especially my bedroom and bathroom!.
Ditto mice.

The more you pick, the more you get

Right, now that that's sorted and I have, so to speak, put my cards on the table, there is something that I love about this time of year.

One of my favourite flowers

The sweet peas always reach their peak now, and flower in a frenzy of scent and colour as if they too are marking off the days, measuring each moment of sunshine before some bitter wind wreaks havoc amongst their delicate tendrils and fragile beauty.
They are a total joy, and bunches of them have gone far and wide, as always.
The last breath of summer..

In Memory of the Elm Tree

I sat down to write something about my beautiful elm tree (now deceased) the other day, but I got waylaid.

Someone had left a comment on my post Picture it in your own words - Regret, in which they said: 'I hope you have a picture of your beautiful tree', so I fished out my old shoeboxes of photos, but then - immersed in a zillion captured moments of my life, I ended up writing On Reflection... instead.

But I am shocked to discover that - so far - I have only unearthed one photograph of my elm tree. A winter picture.

My beautiful elm on the left of the gate, clothed all in white, it's younger sibling standing to attention alongside

The picture is appropriate to the time of year, and beautiful withal, but it doesn't speak eloquently of the elm's soft summer grace, its bountiful green shade, or the delicate elegance of its long, serrated leaves.

How can there be no pictures of my elm? It stands (its poor amputated limbs pleading with the sky) outside my bedroom window, and even more significantly, in full view of the place where I work. I gaze at it every day either consciously or unconsciously. The rooks squabble noisily in its branches every spring, vying for the prime real estate sites - south facing but with the full sea view. Many have had to settle for second best - a grand sea view, but north facing.

Pleading, but to no avail

And here I am, still thinking about it, and writing about it, in the present tense. Because the trunks of both trees still stand, savaged and mute. Any day now, they too will be felled and I shall have to get used to the past tense.

The day he came to remove its crown

I fell in love with the elm tree as instantly and as completely as I fell in love with the house. Except the tree came first, by a whisker. The ash, on the other side of the gate, is also magnificent, and its status has now been bumped up considerably, in the face of my loss. But the elm was always the one.

The butchery begins

In my mind, the tree is soft and green and overshadowing. The sentinel at the gate, the bower of rippling shade that marked our comings and goings, that fretted the early morning sky with filigree lace, that held the evening sun like a great, glowing bowl of light. And in winter, night and morning, the rooks would blow in on the wind like wisps of torn paper, and perform their ritual dance up and down the four corners of heaven before settling on every branch, filling the tree like an outrageously vast crop of fat, black pears.
And its singing has become the music of my life. Flailed by the winter storms, its song was loud and plaintive and robbed my sleep of comfort, but in summer rain, or a summer breeze, there is no better sound than the whispering of a tree - with or without the birdsong.

It is all in my head, but no photographs. Just an abiding familiarity, like an old friend, or the bed you creep into every night. As I said in On Reflection, the best memories, and the stalwarts of our lives aren't necessarily the things we snap. I have spent the last 18 years loving the elm tree, seeing it sometimes more often than members of my own family. It is part of who I am, but there's no photographic record.

I suppose I never needed one. I just had to look out of the window.
But no more.

I am very sad.
Kahil Gibran wrote: 'Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky. We fell them down and turn them into paper that we may record our emptiness.'
How true, how true.

A lovely friend sent me this poem. She said it had consoled her when she also lost a tree she loved.
I think it is beautiful. Thank you, my friend.

 
The Tree Speaks   by Cathal O Searcaigh

I am the tree that will be destroyed,

tomorrow I will be cut and laid low.

My dignity will be hacked at;

my limbs will be strewn

in the dirt of the street –

my strong limbs.

The white blossom of my laugh will be stolen.

Everything I have stored

in the marrow of memories will be destroyed;

my first tears of joy; my first leaves of hope;

the first syllable of music pulsing through my branches;

the first Spring which clothed me in a green dress.

The tales of adventure related to me

by the birds; the nests that flourished

in the leafy shelter of my eye,

the storms I calmed

in the softness of my embrace.

The children who swung between life and eternity

in my branches; the whispered secrets

breathed to me in the night shadows;

the moon who dressed me in the golden lace of autumn;

the angels who alighted on me with the snow.

With the fluent tongue of my leaves

I defended, passionately,

this space in which I thrive;

in which I spread with wonder

the green thoughts  that come to me in Spring.

With bounteous seeds I covered

this earthly space around me with certainty,

in celebration of the Tree Spirit

that quickened firmly in me

as I came of age.

And tomorrow when they burn me,

when my bones will smoke,

I will become one with the Sky, the Fiery Sky!

that has fuelled my imagination from dawn to dusk

With brightness, with Light

How beautiful the colours and textures of these elm logs are

 Another kind comment I received expressed the sanguine hope that Spring would put new branches and leaves on the elm's severed limbs. Sadly, even if they did, they would die. Dutch Elm disease is carried by a beetle that gets under the bark. Apparently it flies at a certain height, and once the tree is infected, that's it. Curtains - eventually, although it takes a few years. This poor tree has been green and dying for some time. But there is hope that some young, smaller trees, if kept coppiced, might become immune, if they don't grow up to 'beetle flying height'.

The trunks of my trees are going to a friend who will wait patiently for them to season and then use them to make something beautiful - floors or furniture. And I have already kept several pieces that another friend is going to make into something for me to keep as a memento. I will treasure whatever he reveals from the wood.

But, sad as I am now, the future beckons. I am planning to plant two blossom trees where the elms stood. It will take them a few years to grow, but they will have their own identity and be beautiful in their own right. And as I plant them, I shall think of Henry van Dyke's words: 'He that planteth a tree is a servant of God, he provideth a kindness for many generations, and faces that he hath not seen shall bless him.'

As I have done, all these years past, as I have done.

I will also remember the Chinese proverb.
'Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.'

There will be singing again, one of these days.

Perhaps I'll plant something like this - not an elm, but beautiful in its own right