September Aspens

Almost all the leaves have fallen from the local aspens in the past week (I keep wanting to refer to them as "my" aspens I feel so bonded to them).  Tall and majestic their nearly-bare silver branches reach high and wide to touch the sky.  My heart lifts when they come into view. 

We slide definitively into autumn, but here at its true onset it is a kind season.  A warm west wind, high clouds and the bluest of blue skies. I generally meet at least one dog walker on my morning walk but today I was almost alone. Just a solitary jogger in the distance on the cycle path alongside the railway.  So I could take  photographs without feeling too conspicuous since I'm shy about snapping in public. 

There has been a shift in my recovery recently. For the better. The details aren't for the blog - at least not yet - but something has changed.  It will still be slow though.  Quietly hopeful.

Transition

Two different people have told me that an early autumn means we're in for a long, hard winter.  Well, we'll see.  But there is definitely a chill in the morning air, the leaves are turning, and a bumper crop of blackberries is already ripening on the hedges that border the river.

So still this morning. A milky sun giving a soft and gentle light. No wind.  A very distant hum of traffic on the main road.  Birdsong. I keep meaning to re-listen to my bird song CDs to help identify the different calls.  I disturbed half a dozen goldfinches making the most of the opportunity for a blackberry breakfast.  Incidentally the collective noun for goldfinches is a charm as my father once informed me.  (Other collective ornithological delights here.  A bellowing of bullfinches is a particular favourite.).

Today I'm particularly aware of the onset of the cold months as my gas central heating boiler's days are numbered, or so the British Gas technician I called out when the radiators remained stone cold after half an hour of running informed me.  I'm lining up several firms to give me a quote on a new, modern, energy efficient one over the coming week or so but I'll miss my old warhorse.  It has a steampunk look about it and dates from the late 1980s, from the era of Duran Duran, padded shoulders and mobile phones the size of a brick.  It has grunted and creaked  and whirred its noisy way through the last six winters since I moved into this house and I've always been aware that it and I have been living on borrowed time as far as heating is concerned.  Even now it hasn't given up the ghost completely, as it still provides hot water in the taps.

Quite a significant week to come all in all.  I've an appointment this Tuesday that I'm pinning far too much hope on because, probably mistakenly, it feels like my last hope of getting back to anything approaching a normal life. Yes, there is more than a hint of desperation here but my ability to "trust the process" has been severely tested of late.  Don't want to say any more about it in case I put a jinx on the whole business. 

Odd one out

Whatever else is going on (test results still awaited) and in spite of the ups and downs and grinding frustrations of my present state I've got some mobility back and that's extraordinary.

The aspens are still as glorious, though over the last day or two I've noticed the very first yellow leaves on the ground beneath the trees.  We're a week away from Lughnasa, the start of the harvest. The summer is inching its way along towards autumn, the nights now imperceptibly lengthening.  There's a way to go yet of course but the first signs are there if you look.  A reminder, even on hot motionless July days, that the world is ceaselessly turning, that nothing is forever.

When I'm walking by the river I feel the odd one out. Nothing new there and I'm wearing my differences much more comfortably these days. But even at weekends I'm aware that I'm the only person who is just walking for pleasure (as well as therapy in my case). With a camera. On my own. There are a band of regular dog walkers. One or two joggers very occasionally.   All of us smile and say hello as we pass each other.  Maybe they wonder what I'm doing or - more probably - maybe they've got better things to think about.

 A dog might be nice though. Just for the walks. Perhaps I could borrow one?

Today, July 27th, would have been my father's birthday. Someone else who loved to walk just for the sake of it.  I'll light a candle.    

Circles

Buds

Calm after recent upheavals. Rest and relaxation. Reading U is for Undertow and catching up on Kinsey Milhone as she ferrets out more murderous goings-on in California. It's a relief to be reducing the painkillers. A visit from the mobile hairdresser helps as well. All this serenity is unusual on the day of a full moon (of course it doesn't apply to the global economy, but I'm not even going there).

And on a dank November morning the first buds of a Christmas cactus, flourishing in the moist warmth of the bathroom.

Movement

Midnight. Through the bedroom window the moon is hidden but the long strips of cloud moving across the sky are back-lit with cool silver. In the distance a car speeds by and across the black fields the river flows on alone and silent. The world turns and when I awake it is still dark. The first train of the day rumbles its way north while I watch Jupiter descend towards the horizon, ice-bright and as fiery and pure as a diamond. The rising sun and a rhythmic swish of wings of a flight of geese and high above a speck of a plane leaves a solitary vapour trail.

October

A heavy, warm rain. The horse chestnuts have turned a gold-brown though the silver birch, apart from the odd yellow leaf, remains stalwartly green, resisting the steady march towards winter. In the next few days I'll phone the gardener to arrange for the final tidying up session of the season. Lavender to cut back, ditto lemon balm. Lawn to mow. The dying laurel bush to be despatched.

****

A nervous week. The cat - already on a special renal diet - started drinking more water than usual. A while ago I was warned by the vet that this could be a sign that the feline Grim Reaper is sharpening his scythe. In the last 24 hours the drinking has diminished but to be on the safe side we are taking him in for blood tests. A friend has been roped in for assistance - at 5+ kilos he is far too heavy for me to carry at the moment.

We've had these scares before but I'm aware of the fleetingness of life, even for one seemingly so resilient. When the time does come - be it next week, next month or next year - it will be very hard without him.

Respite

The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk but divert yourself by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise.

Thomas Jefferson


Sunrise. Day off, the last one ahead of a work scramble to meet a deadline. For the first time for aeons the rain has stopped and the sun is shining. I need to get out of the house. Throw on clothes, a parka and wellington boots and head for the fields with the camera. Nothing like photography, with the focus and attention on the present that it demands, to curb - if not stop - obsessive thinking.

The air is cool and fresh, the sky a pale blue. Puffballs of cloud blown along by a gusty south-west wind periodically hide the sun and the drop in temperature at these times is noticeable. The morning light extraordinary, as it so often is. Crows pass overhead, cawing, then drop from the sky onto a newly ploughed field. A faint deep throb of machinery from the small industrial estate hidden behind a barrier of trees can be felt, rather than heard.

No-one else to be seen. It is midweek, after all, and most people are at work.

Just past the railway bridge, a touch of the surreal.


The river flooded recently. My guess: an angler’s chair, temporarily moved to higher ground. A group of mallards are swept downstream by the force of the current and I watch them until they disappear from view. They speed past, imperturbable, bobbing on the surface of the water. I stop and turn around, looking for my visual touchstone, the ridge of the Black Mountains on the western horizon. The wind strengthens, buffets a mass of gold-brown leaves on the oak tree, but they cling on tightly, reluctant to leave their branches.

At the hawthorn bush I turn for home. Under the arches of the bridge, a hint of the macabre. A doll’s leg half buried in the mud, left behind by the floodwater. No sign of the torso.

****

A lunch meeting in town. Good talk. Then back to prune the ivy that grows up the side of the house. It is starting to grow over the electricity and gas meter boxes and must be cleared. Cut back the lavender and trim the dead fuchsia stalks, raw material galore for the compost heap.

The cat sits in the November sun and makes a show of supervising my efforts, but his heart isn’t in it. After a few minutes, with a twitch of the tail, he wanders back indoors.



I didn’t have high expectations for the day. It surprised me with its perfection.

Anxiety

Stressed. Work. Uncertainty and indecision.

So, once again, it’s a walking, not a cycling, day. What convinced me was pedalling full tilt into the side of a slow moving car recently when the concentration was elsewhere. Fortunately no harm done to self or bicycle or car, and the driver was touchingly concerned about my physical welfare - and my mental state probably, though he didn’t say so.

I crave the rhythmic action of walking. Steady and regular. One foot in front of the other, right, left. The autumn morning, damp and so still, the trees enveloped in their auras of gold and ochre and russet, the earth solid beneath my feet, reassuring. People pass. I exchange greetings with one or two.

The brain still runs in dark circles and the stomach remains a black hole. The exercise doesn’t make the symptoms go away, not at all. Yet it becomes a wordless instruction on surviving a future that seems to crouch somewhere ahead, menacing and waiting to pounce.

Keep going. One step. Then the next. Walk right towards it.

Proximity

You’ve been travelling since that morning and now the sun is going down behind the hill at the end of a limpid autumn day and along with a dozen others you’re waiting at the little Victorian station at Great Malvern for the final train to take you home. Last leg of the journey.

The body itches and aches with travel fatigue, a day of sitting too long, not moving enough. You walk along the platform, pulling the suitcase behind you, and take a few photographs. It has been a good few days away, a respite from the reports of financial meltdown and a reminder of reality, of the nuts and bolts of living in close proximity with another person for more than three hours at a time. It can be done.

Back to the bench. Two teenagers walk over and sit down. Extremely 21st century, boyfriend/girlfriend, pale, dressed in black with spiky hair and a clusters of metal studs in nose, mouth and ears, they exchange sentences in a desultory fashion. At first sight they seem edgy, hostile even, yet their conversation becomes surprisingly conventional. College. Examinations. Friends. How to navigate through the next seven days without upsetting the parents.

You’re not used to young people these days except as the collective subject of doom-ridden news items. In spite of wariness and mammoth preconceptions, you warm to these two.

Nothing to fear here. Nothing to envy either, not really.

Behind us the cool moon rises, almost full.

River Path

Click to enlarge.


Brown water murmurs
and churns,
its current
tugging fretfully
at the willow branches.
Come with me.

....

A boy on a red bicycle
hurrying to reach
his future
anxious to overtake me,
saying excuse me
pedals by.

....

I move aside
and watch them pass.

Change of season

I know. It isnt October. I just needed to blog.

This early autumn, with its golden afternoons and cold, clear nights is proving to be a gorgeous one. I stare at the flowers - autumn daisies, fuchsias, dahlias - and the changing leaves, trying to commit those vibrant reds and yellows and oranges to memory, to soak them up. Grey days lie ahead, and these have their own beauty, but I will miss the colours.

I ignore dire warnings about corrupted files, cross my fingers and, once again, switch on the ailing laptop ....