My heart rises with them
Last Week
Rising sun, a yellow globe, but smudged by the rear window and reversed in the driving mirror. Shining over the car, over the road, over the plain and kissing the tops of the clouds, brightening then from grey, making them faerie things.
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the redwings are back in town
2 Weeks Ago
Perching on high, making the blackbirds a bit nervous and then bobbing on the lawn, in harlequin plumage, the redwings are back. Pale eye-stripes and cheeks, red under the wing and with a thrush's speckles on their chests, they come to the gardens every year to plunder the berry bushes.
On Saturday we also saw beautiful song thrushes, keeping so still between their hops on the lawn that they vanish like the Cheshire cat. We saw a wren, so close that the speckles on its flight feathers looked like tiny butterfly eyes. Out and about we even saw a red admiral, fluttering on the high street, near the sea.
The forest is returned to a water-garden, the lanes are covered in washed gravels and stranded twigs. Tonight is clear and cold. A frost?
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light plays
3 Weeks Ago
A rattling, creaking, howling, moaning night with episodic hissing rain. The weather following its recent pattern; plenty of weather, delivered sideways.
The morning broke quiet. The clouds were still regrouping having been torn to shreds and the light was stunning. It was, at first, a light without direction, shining equally on floor and ceiling. More like a ubiquitous glow. I'm trying to use the word "suffuse" in here somehow, but it keeps jamming round the edges when I try to slot it into a sentence.
The world outside looked swept clean, the brown leaves had been pushed under hedges, glued to wire mesh fences. Roads and paths were shiny, blasted clean by natures leaf blower and high pressure water jets.
Out in the forest, light replaced leaves in the spikey canopy, shining sometimes yellow, sometimes more pink. The boughs themselves are the remaining green, with covers of moss and lichens. Silver birch glowed cleanly, branched beacons in the gloomy underbrush.
I was feeling quite poetic, driving into the market town. An unfamiliar, ragged line of school children waited on the nearside for their morning bus, the younger ones untidy, playing. Older girls held court in a tight group at one end. Sensible black leather shoes, a good length of wooly tights, topped by the uniform rolled-top skirt and a dark jersey. Their dramatic secrets were screened from the world by their meshed umbrellas, forming a shield that appeared as interlocking domes of variagated Laura Ashley print. Enforced uniformity below (with attitudenal touches), aspirational fine floral prints above.
Composing fancy prose in the traffic light queue I smiled broadly as, turning North again, I found myself driving towards the limb of a rainbow. Nature providing its own colourful cliche, just on cue. As the houses gave way to heath again, the sun streamed bright, straight, from just over the horizon, striking reflections from the wet.
The clouds are condensing again. Pulling in the mists that edged them earlier, they resemble puff pastry under a microscope. A hundred shades of grey interspersed with blue bands. Sun rays, now with direction, cut shadows from the trees, cars and lamp-posts outside and a gentle breeze stirs.
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green summer
4 Weeks Ago
Green summer has passed.
Yellow and orange mark the path,
winter is coming.
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Activity 10x4
Nov 8, 2009
We have settled, as a family, into indoor activity this morning and so, it seems prudent to prepare the main meal for lunch time, leaving the afternoon free for some outdoor fun.
A small bacon joint has, therefore, just been tipped from fridge to roasting tin and, during the simple process, I had a chance to glance down the garden and enjoy the steady, pretty descent into winter.
Just outside the kitchen window we have a small, shadowy bed, terminated by a stub wall that blocks the view down the side of the house from the road. The shade is a consequence of rampant ivy and honeysuckle covering this wall and the adjacent neighbour's fence. On the end of the wall, part shielded by ivy, hangs a squirrel-proof bird feeder and I have, in the past, made much reference to this feeding station and its visitors.
As I scanned the garden this morning, this small corner of the plot was alive with activity. Four bluetits were methodically searching the leaves and stems of the flowering currant, that grows out from the bed over the adjecent stone slabs and the herbs that push up between them, searching, I guess. for spiders and aphids.
from the left a great-tit flew straight through the feeder's bars, appearing to land beak first at the food supply, immediately pecking and prising at the nuts in their mesh. The bluetits were hardly phased at all and continued their probing search, interrupted only by the usual flock politics, the pecking orders.
Over the fence, at the far end of this rectangle of tangled growth, a male bullfinch hopped, not bright enough now to mistaken for a mango, except in unusual lighting circumstance. He fluttered, flitted and then hovered as he delicately picked a ripe, red honeysuckle berry off a tall stem. He landed back in the bush, holding the jewel, his beak already sawing gently to release the goodness within.
Further down the plot, blackbirds chased around the apple tree boughs and over the shed roof; dunnocks lurked, their hiding places revealed by the seasonal fall of leaves. The jackdaws that were there earlier, checking the trees for residual apples, were already gone, allowing the blackbirds back to their familiar roost.
A wasp attented to the yellow haze of flowering ivy stems, tasting their pom-poms for nectar.
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