Tag Archives: sun

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.

Hat

They say “I’ll eat my hat!” And that would taste of wet, or dusty dry, wool. Like a mouthful of sheep.

The funny ear flaps that unfold from inside my woollen Tilley are black and soft. Somehow not yet needed in all my hot weather wearing. I feel the sweat prickle out of my scalp and forehead, and the sun’s heat warming the air trapped inside. The wind threatens to blow it off into the sea; I tilt the angle closer down over forehead, to counteract.

The taste of water too long warmed in a plastic bottle in the over-heating car. Don’t they say all males of all species are being slowly feminised by some kind of petro-chemical leaching into our water? The androgynous alligators?

I smell the pines baking in the heat, exuding scent of resin and hot needles. A swirl of dry dust. Wild fennel sun-bursts, smiling in sulphur-yellow splendour. Blackberries melting off the brambles, losing their edge, their bite.

Eyeing the steep, grey scree-slope with perilous path above the sea.