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. 

January

A still day in mid January between two storms. It is the late afternoon and the sun is low. The trees have been brushed clean by rain and wind. They are illuminated by yellow light but by some trick of the day, it is the contrast which shines. Perhaps it's the dark clouds in layers on the northern horizon, grey and blue, with all shades of blue down to the horizon. The trees look like pen and ink drawings, every branch stark. Every building on the low hills rolling up to the clouds are outlinked in black ink against the glow. Not golden, not buttery, but yellow like a pale sun, or sere, or gentle the colour of fawns, which is no surprise. Every hedge is outlined and there, hiding low, there are some greens. Between the bands of clouds there are white clouds which are turning from the colour of wool scraps on a barbed wire fence, to textured warm yellows and tints of rose as the sun dies. At home we have watercolours, gifts from a relative, which capture exactly this.

Even in midwinter, England can be beautiful.

Asleep in the Old Churchyard

One of the perils of booking a service through third - or possibly fourth and fifth parties - is that the provider of that service has free rein to stuff one royally at the last minute. With Lady Snoutingdingle's long planned weekend away in tatters, we trawled the last-minute sites to find somewhere to stay. In our younger day, we would have piled into the automobile and headed for the hills, going as far as the traffic would let us and then availing ourselves of the services of those nice ladies they used to have in Tourist Offices who knew every B&B for fifty miles and would sort you out in a jiffy. These days, with the Old Hunter unable to 'do stairs' our options are a bit more strictly limited. We found somewhere in the Peak District. A charming chapel conversion.

In a graveyard.

Naturally we assumed that the aforementioned graveyard would be a few old headstones, half hidden in the grass, wobbling distance from a pub. Not so. It was a full-on graveyard in current use, surrounded on all sides by high walls, and a forbidding wrought-iron gate at the boundary. It was well tended, and flowers were struggling out of hibernation in the bushes and on the trees. I couldn't help thinking that the winking eyes of the flowers were, in fact, composed of bits of long-dead persons hauled from their sleepy hollows by unrepentant roots. In the sun, it was beautiful and the chapel was beautifully appointed. In the rain, its charm faded a little. At night, with no external lights, those watchful blooms seemed even more like eyes than before.

The Old Hunter loved it, of course, not least when he returned from some foray with a large peice of bone. I assume that it was not human.

By far the dominant feature of the graveyard was a magnificent Horse Chestnut tree. It filled one corner and coated the floor with both conkers and the old skins of conkers which the Hunter muttered about as they stabbed his paws. She had nine trunks, each too thick to wrap my arms around, and each trunk reached up over a hundred feet, like a great crown festooned with pyramids of flowers. I wondered what kind of soil might breed such a tree, but of course, the graveyard was richly endowed. I looked up at the tree and it looked down at me with a million tiny, blinking eyes. In the way of such co-incidences I have recently become besotted with a traditional song by the Wailin' Jennys whose version* contains the lines:

But were I at rest 'neath yonder tree
Why would you weep, my friends, for me?

When I sleep in the graveyard, I can only dream that some part of me will become something so magnificent whether it be a tree or a song.

*other versions are available.