The Garden at Moorfield Journal: 20
The Good Of Winter and our Discontent 26.05.2023
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was in me, an invincible summer”. - Albert Camus
In a week she will arrive, though I suspect she may already be here, hanging on the hazy morning air and from my mouth when I speak, in clouds of breath, the ache in my teeth and knee, the drying out of my eyes and skin. The hesitation of roses to open and the house to rise from beneath bedcovers. The skeletal branches like broomsticks stuck in the earth, upended and their golden carpet, now brown and uninspiring, prompting me to rake them into piles before they decay too far, before I can take them where I need to use them in the garden to build beds for spring seedlings…….but it is cold and gloomy, dark clouds loom on the horizon and the warmth we’ve trapped within the homestead says to me, stay, stay and write, this is when the new thinking comes, remember?
I first came to know her in any intimate way, Winter, in the farthest northern point of the west coast of the US, where I lived when I was 15 and experienced days that rarely got above 8 degrees, rain fell daily, sometimes all day, everyday for weeks it seemed, and most likely did but I tried not to pay it too much attention, most of the year it rained in that far flung corner of the world and we all did our best not to notice.
The only saving grace for me? The majesty of a landscape so drunk on it, all the environment appeared exaggerated and one became dizzy and discombobulated, surrounded as you were, soaked through too, with awe for such staggering scale and dramatic country. That life could form such unimaginable beauty and yet make it so tyrannical, so unrelenting on all who attempted to inhabit it, so intense on the eye, the bitterness on bare skin, the ache in your ears and joints, the dominance it held over ones days that it dictated almost every element of it, and debilitated one such as me, who had never known cold and wet, let alone cold and wet like this, nor worn so many clothes at any one time.
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