The Garden at Moorfield: 19
A Season for Everything.......and Apricot Jam. 19.05.2023
My eye searches the landscape of inbetween, not quite the end of Autumn, not quite the beginning of Winter. I study the trunks of the ash trees, now their leaves have all but left them, I find their skeletons almost more beautiful than any other form they take. They are marvels and I study the way their branches twist and jerk in different directions, weep and point at the sky behind them. If I were younger when I lived here, I would’ve climbed them, I am sure Nessie will, she attempts to, a hoist up from dad while her legs are still, “So short!”, she laments. Oh to long for aging. I tell her, there is plenty of time for climbing trees but I know, that is not really true but at 3, all time is an eternity and without chapters, she is at the very beginning of her story. I tell her about the trees I used to climb and how very different they were to the Ash, in a place where winter never came and trees that lose their leaves, would never grow.
The air here smells of the earth this morning. It is the slow breakdown of three seasons leaves and that of many moons more, now bedded to the ground for winter as the latest layer of time to pass and of burning wood, sent out in chimney smoke that hides within the mists. Indiscernible from them, if not for its smell. It’s a heady perfume, I’ve always found and is for me, the smell of country life, of farm life, carried around where I keep a million moments that mattered. This one, from so long ago, when I first experienced autumn, and autumn when she is more winter, than herself and bit at my skin so unaccustomed to cold and my nose ran like a tap. The kind of season I saw illustrated in my childhood books written north of the equator by Enid Blyton and Beatrix Potter. Where I first marvelled at my breath out in front of me and learnt that gardening keeps time and the rituals of food and seasons, are long embedded in my ancestry.
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