There is the welcome sigh of an early autumn wind which touches my bare arm. I remember a girl, long, long ago, whose touch gave me the same icy shiver of joy. Alas the wind does not follow up its caress with that first kiss and the precious memory will have to do.
To save gas, we have bought a rocket stove and burn some fraction of the wood that would go to rustic fences or the slow compost of the woodpile. As a result we have slid our cooking into the garden and slowed down so that it is often a race between the food and the darkness. Now we are wrapped in the produce of the searing summer. We cook apples down to freeze for the next year's breakfasts. We cook yet more apples and grapes to make chilli jam. The smoke from the rocket stove has touched it and that, and the chilli, and the joy of our eating food that we have grown is as warming as I can imagine.
The bees that we have worked hard to over-winter hit the Night Planted Orchard with merry abandon and then buggered off, little sods. So I put a box to, perhaps, trap a swarm, only to find that a swarm has found the second and also empty hive which I was about to mothball. A moment of small victory. Welcome, little gatherers.
I spent the day making a mattock from scratch at The Oldfield Forge. I could write about my connection with my metalworking ancestors, or the primal nature of the forge. But four hours beating the bejeesus out of a strip of iron is as cathartic as it needs to be. No more need be said. The mattock, now fitted with an antler handle, is a thing of beauty in the eye of its creator and, what's more, efficienty cuts the stems of ash and hazel which we are growing to feed our rocket stove.
The sun is cold, white gold. Coloured fleeces on the washing line. The smell of dew falling. A fresh, steady wind like a sea breeze. Faultless blue sky. A lone queen, optimistic in her bumbling. Bees fresh from their winter slumber, feasting in the Mirabelles, themselves carelessly early and defiant of the frosts. Bringing pollen to the hive for their own hungry queen, to start her laying on the steady march on Spring. The sun, which has been warm today to our winter-adapted bodies, turns first to amber and then to hot scarlet as it touches the horizon.
Velvet Snoutingdingle