Wheelbarrow Meals

A September evening. We're having a few days of late warmth but behind it the heat is seeping out of the year day by day. This morning a mist lay in the fen like smoke from the doused embers of the summer. The light over the soft mist was low and brilliant. This is the first of my three beautiful things: honey and soft ochre dripping over the world. 

Later in the morning I saw that the harvested fields made lines across the landscape like a musical manuscript. The residual haze softened the colours. Sere gold dominates. On the horizon the trees are softened still further until they are like dissolving watercolour lines against a blue wash sky. The picture beside this post was taken in the nineties, from a bus on the way to work. For me it captures the very essence of early autumn in the Fens. Endless fields. Lonely trees. Black Earth. Colours that fill the huge sky.

I live for the light of autumn and September is my favourite month. Each evening we've loaded our battered red wheelbarrow with our evening meal and trailed it down to the orchard with the Old Hunter in tow. We pass under the tree where the bees were squatting in the little owl box. They were rescued by a kind beekeper a week ago. This is my second beautiful thing, the bees are safe now, but the old orchard feels empty without them, like the house does if the Old Hunter is not there.

The sunset is chipped into jewelled facets by the hedge and shards of red-orange are scattered on the grass.  There is a vivid lull, under the trees, with wrens hopping about and foxes barking. A lull between the constant effort of the summer, and pruning and cutting tasks of early winter. A few late beetroot are racing the summers-end. There are still beans on the plants. A self-set sunflower nods like a yellow card from those old Batman TV shows: POW! POLLEN! We've taken to smoking food in an old pan with chipped fruit tree prunings. The air is full of the smell of smoke, smouldering fig wood and slow-cooking sausages. As it grows dark the Old Hunter is torn between the bangers and the creeping, rustling beasts in the woods. He puthers back and forth, nose alternately low to the hedge and high to the cooking pan. Pruning offcuts crackle in the chiminea. An insense burner tries and fails to repel biting insects. A bat flits. A woodpecker swoops. We enjoy the failing light and the deep silence. We feel the creeping cold huddle together, all three of us, not quite ready to batten down the hatches for a brutal winter. This is my third beautiful thing for today: defiance. We are not quite ready to retreat from our beautiful, sleepy old orchard. We'll wait a little longer because I fear that this strange and deadly year is not done yet.