Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

Overnight the spiders had washed their webs and hung them out to dry on the hedge. I imagine spiders with pegs, with silk aprons and peg pockets and curlers in their hair. While the webs blow on the line they brew pots of coffee and settle at a table with a piece of bluebottle toast. But the butterflies! They seem drunk on life, bumping in-out of leaves, slurring their flight, waving their bright wings. Have they been dancing all night? Are their shoes all worn through? They will knock over the spiders’ best china, barging about like that. The spiders seem stoic about it. Life is a gamble, they say, and thumb through their cookbooks.

Some garden crops lie ready for reap. The rocket (arugula) though flowering still, is falling back. Seed pods turn to parchment, holding bumps of ink. Pumpkin leaves smother the beet, they over-reach - abundant bullies. Some of our tomatoes have been picnicked by mice. Seeds dropped hither and thither: they are not tidy, these mice. Autumn starts with renewed purpose. Fruition is the beginning not the end. On goes the pan, to boil up jam, ketchups, chutney. Some nights curl in, as a coverlet. Not this night, this early September eve; this uncovers, supersedes. We lose the illusory day and are left breathless. Facing darkness we are reached by pins of starlight. Distance in galactic scales: still they reach us. We are moth-like, small parcels of heart and instinct. It is the winter’s cold strike that readies the seed. The pull of the stars that wakes us.

Round bales carapaced in black, in the fields, in formations. Clouds that blew in from an oil painting, circa 1700. Love how the trees lean from a predominant onshore. Our white car, new, we even keep it clean, drives by the crossroads where the sheep thief was buried. Circa? Imagine the dirt under his fingernails; why this detail? They hanged him on Gallows Hill. Up in the town they beheaded a priest, circa 1600. Not the same ‘they’ as in people, the same ‘they’ as in upholders of the law. Home is mildly clean, swept, the garden tangled, verdant. So what’s the right thing to do? This history that leads to here, this present time stuck with bits of beautiful, bits of raw inequality? From global to local, the thread that leads to my own door? Where does this go? Simple advice to myself: it is up to me, just what I do. Avoid apathy. Buy local, there’s a start, make your own bread. Hand over the earth with minimal apology. Broken necks are vivid stories: keep the...

It is possible that we did. Track through the maize jungle, doused in rain. We were monkeys, giggling. Slunk big cats, louche, fantastic. Bright birds. Or maybe it was something we thought of: today’s adventure could be… Trespass through the living crop. Maize grows with toes, it can, at any time, rise up. Run on its toes like raptors. Leaves wide as machetes. Take nothing for granted in here. Rain forest magic in here. We have our best adventure-trousers on, and Wellington boots. It is possible. Anything is.

It must be a year since the damsons were planted, and the meadow grass grew its gold splay, and now we have it just right to backlight this spiderweb. A garden takes time but returns it in increments of moments that somehow contain timelessness; like the sun can be caught in one raindrop, perhaps, reflective magic.  This morning Mr is finishing a sleep that began on the sofa last night. Dog was curled on her bed, Fat Beagle had taken the vacant man-space, before we went out for our garden wander. The mist was thickest over the river. We walked in dots and all the while the sun was clearing it up. I have my coffee mug, and my camera, a slouchy t-shirt, old shorts. Two dogs snuffling, for scent-gossip and their favourite grass snacks. ‘Look at this web.’ I say, but they just stare down to the river.

Of beach and field and chips and ice cream, of campfire stories with smoke and marshmallows, of flickery lights and buttered vegetables, of a whale skull and wide skies and unexpected swimming, one holiday is assembled. Never dressed in day clothes much before midday. Breakfast served in waves of impulse; eggs and toasts, and bits of fruit peel piling on a picnic table. Dogs underfoot, wanting to help with anything we might drop. Children cook at the mud kitchen, making delicious cups of mud, but sometimes they are not children, they are snow leopards and puppies, or ponies, or cows called Betsy. Grandad gets tethered to a tree; again. Wet clothes lump on warm stones; dry ones rescued from a tide stranded rock. Laughing: we spend some time on that. At night we follow the lines of flames, up, up; all of us struck, over and over, with every sliver, every glint, that there are the stars of our origin. What else could we need?

Widdershins, barefoot, slowly walk around the block, around the lanes that lay around the fields, warm road sometimes flat, sometimes not.  Kick small stones from a bold instep. Pods of storm cross overhead. The maize crop has grown, enough to whisper secrets. Leaves shiver, clustered like spears. Sun on puddles makes them shining pieces of dropped sky.  In the river tethered clouds skim and bump.  Here, flip-flops in hand, just walking, listening, absorbing. Later, hear the wind shake; shake the light from the sky. Rayburn lit. Water hot. Light a candle, take a bath. Water on skin. Rain on glass. See steam droplets on tiles, sparkled by a naked flame.