Tag Archives: autumn

Sprouting potato

Green-tinged, somewhat shrivelled. Fragile, finger-like, waxy shoots emanating. This spud has spent too long waiting to be boiled, and is making a bid for freedom.

Resurrection.

Mum fishes it out of the fridge and sets it aside for planting. It’s the one that got away.

I dig great ridges of metallic-smelling, crumbly brown earth – pulling out couch grass and bishop-weed, shaking soil off the roots and flinging them in the cracked yellow pail. It’s a big task, and yet I’m happy. Inquisitive neighbours look down from the pavement passing above, and cars snore by. The potatoes are gently laid to rest at 18 inch intervals, and earthed up. No watering – it would simply make them rot.

As weeks pass, dark green leaves peek through, brushing the earth from their faces and smiling at the fickle sun. They stretch themselves higher. And yet, some gardening wisdom – handed down, but poorly understood – says I must once more “earth them up”. I bury them again up to their necks.

Paperless statements

Not the long anticipation and morning expectancy of when the Puffin Club magazine will arrive. Not the sound of gravel scrunching as the red Post Office van pulls up at the house, a couple of minutes after its brief rhythmic staccato traverse of the cattle grid’s girdered texture. Not slitting open the handwritten envelope and pulling out a crisply folded, coloured, distinctive invitation to a seasonal Celtic festival.

Not getting up from the dinner table to pull out the vast Oxford dictionary, search the feather-light, thin pages for the elusive word, stumbling on others that amuse and astonish.

Not the chaotic misfiling and non-filing of administrative mail, layered with odd socks like a nightmare lasagne, on, under, around and randomly distant from my dysfunctional desk.

Not the arrival of a weightless blue Air Letter from distant friend in New Zealand, handwritten in every precious corner and adorned with fond sketches and love hearts.

Not the long gaps of no stimulus from the external world, of simple presence with doors opening and closing, wood smoke backing down the chimney and flavouring the air, frost on the ash leaves brittling their stems and releasing them heavily on the first touch of morning’s sun.

Loch Ness ladle

There’s a cast iron swing arm that suspends the stew pot over the peat fire. Blackened, and rough to the touch. You can vary the height by removing a tapered pin and replacing it in the next hole.

Smoke and succulent steam. Firelight. The unique, highland smell of peat. The roof beams are low and blackened, and the door stands partly open to the wilds outside.

I’m mourning the real wildness that was once here. Wide tarmac intrudes on the water’s edge, and the hills are barren and sheep-scarred. When they said Highland Clearances, they weren’t joking. It’s shorn to the bone.

Still, the cloud-flecked light ripples across muscular hills, and rich browns of autumnal bracken blend with ageing purple heathers. The sun explodes from behind briefly broken cloud.

Why is it that we wish for cellophane-wrapped, ready-meal lives, when wildness and wet and muck and mud and misery still survive at the corners of our concrete creations?

I sip the steaming stew from the ladle’s bowl, and look out over dark water where no mythical monster is needed, where awe already resides.

Hedgehog

Sigh. Somehow, it represents my broken self, hiding under a mound of leaves, hoping the world will go away and leave me alone.

The sweet smell of gently decaying leaves. Wood smoke burning – hopefully not too close at hand. The damp flakiness of was-brittle foliage on my cheek and down my neck. Tickling.

I can hear sirens wailing in the world outside – alien to this earthy retreat. Not a successful retreat, if invaded so. The ground wavers underneath me like an uneasy boat. My head is spinning.

So sad to see the futility, ineffectiveness, of a hedgehog’s curled up defence, exposed on the shelterless tarmac, responding to dangers beyond its ability to avert. Only if the drivers care, show gentleness, slow down – and have regard for some accidentally different creature or soul who stumbled into the path of their life. Just to really feel – to take time to care – despite their own busy concerns and closer friends.

Even the fleas on the hedgehog’s spines have their place, seem benign.

I poke my head out and test the air on my face – then turn around and hide again.