Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

If we are lucky, there is a recollection from childhood that we revere for being a time when expectations were delivered upon. Impatience at the waiting will have existed, but we remember the thrill better. Ingratitude may have been present, but not held in memory. We were open to the immensity of receiving and satiated by the result. It could have been a toy, a feast, a visit, any number of details. If we are lucky, we have this in memory. This is the uncomplicated bliss with which I hold a new seed catalogue. Those who garden understand, those who don’t feel let down perhaps - a seed catalogue? Recaptures all that? Not recapture, not nostalgia. A development of the grateful receipt that allows true happiness. As adults, we must do the work ourselves of course, it is a more proactive experience. We make decisions - here the priorities are edible and medicinal - towards constructing our lives, living how we wish to live in order to make the most of being alive: not ex

When I click the beams full, my car has the eyes of a giant. The road and the night are one colour. I follow a line of stars homeward. All the sky is stars: a maze of lights: the eyes of my car gape. How simple it would be to amble up, meander, squint-bleary, marvel time away. How would we find our way back? I don’t know. I think we would be laughing too much, but then find a bean stalk, helter-skelter, plonk, back on the driveway. Find a pot of gold in the footwell.

Frost held the grass still, early this morning. Birds sang. Daffodils, without the nods of breeze, seemed lost in dreams. Today they took Clarrie to the crematorium. There will be a fine view over the woods from there. Maybe the starlings will fly, make sympathetic murmurations over the canopy of Cardinham.  Grandchild 2 passed the pegs, while we hung out washing on the rotary lines. My back ached from levelling soil, from making new beds in the polytunnel: we will grow melons for the summer. ‘It is sad, Granma,’ the little one says. ‘Your friend is died.’ And she says, ‘Oh! I love melons!’ She helped to seal the envelope of the memoriam card, carried it to Carol next door, for passing on at the service. Ron was going up to feed the chickens: the little one went up too, made backward skips away from the pecking. ‘Remember Clarrie’s sweet peas?’ Carol said. ‘We collected seeds in September, you can have some. We can all grow sweet peas at the side of our houses.’

This skyline is a pale bleed, cloud into sea, dissolving. The sea is salt-milk, wind churned, flung in daubs, white froth on fish-silver sheen. Above the wind-line clouds edge inland, sun on their backs, grey fleece and opal. A three-quarter moon in the clear sky sits, pulling tides. Mr and me, in the car with the bad starter motor, sit, eat bargain bucket cream tea from regrettable plastic. Gulls are calling, in flight, at the fierce air. Gorse shivers non-stop. This show is fantastic. It has everything. Cloud swallows moon. Crumbs of scone skim out into the road.

Winter melts. In breezes Spring, the unfurler, the light of wing. Wind comes cold without bite: a soother of fevers, a sweeper of fears. Warmth comes, in beams of sun. What is it that you want, the earth whispers: I can grow it. Up in the field the old barn is breaking. ‘Entropy.’ I point: Dog has an air of trying not to laugh in my face. (What is it that she knows?) At home mess has vigorous regrowth. Today it signifies creative abundance. Crumbs of bread because our soup was delicious. Mud prints over the kitchen floor because the garden begins its bloom. Drain still blocked and this matters not: if anything, how the water spills, the foam from washed clothes, the icky slick of dish water, it is lively, jaunty even, over the messed up gravel. Washing whips on the line till we pull it in out of the hail. The sun comes back, beaming warm.

Friday Afternoon: In daylight, I saw the owl. White, the colour of ghosts and beginnings; deep in purpose, flying over a road. Tired, I was, but in warm clothes. The sky was rinsed blue, the roads wet. How the old car still rolls is mysterious. But, there I was, driving rust through road-spray, struck admirably dumb. Saturday Afternoon: Rain span out from the edge of a storm. From inside my polytunnel bubble I hear it. I am smiling, tidying up, making ready. My running shoes mud-sodden, left on the porch step. My legs feel good. Earth browned hands untangle roots. Here and there budlets burst from a stem. Here: peeping from a pot, the pretty faces of winter pansies.  Put into my pocket rich leaves for soup.  

What a show this is, the Weather Spectacular! Hail strikes and sheets of lightening - gripped we are in the drama of it - agog for thunder which rolls elsewhere - where did that thunder go? And when the sun strikes up the wind cuts ice cold through unwary bones. And then rain, heavy  rain that would flatten a rainbow. How can water be so cold and not ice? The sky so dark and not night? And if there were a time to venture tender petals, would this be it? A time for buds to birth from bark? But here they are: vulnerable, with fortitude. The miracle of reoccurrence.