Wishbone Soup Cures Everything

Michaelmas is long gone and no one has told the blackberries up here. I wasn’t about to let on. Under stripes of cloud and sun, a fruit feast is plucked, is popped, piece by piece, in to a thirsty mouth. Cut stalks noisy under walking feet, fingers tinged purple; from fields to moors over the river, I spy out. I shall traverse this open ground, I announce, whilst the air holds dry. But into the small woods we are drawn, Dog and I; her by scent and me by leaf. Sometimes we see more, standing in shade. Structures in bright relief. Dog can easily follow the path as it tunnels under fern and bramble. I follow, stumble, trousers caught in thorny twine. No less happy - this is adventure. This is story living, story making. We become what we live, so we should live with care and abandon. In the light, to stride, to acknowledge happiness. In the shade, to know the light shines through. To be of structural interest. Leaves are falling, as we head home along our winding la

In the polytunnel. Draped in sun, I am sitting. Contemplating on this, sitting, listening. Absorption happens. Bird chatter, scent of damped soil warming. How the sun has dressed this lawn, in beaded rainbows. Even Dog gives in to the bliss, lolls her head on the doorframe. Yesterday was the first frost. The first new moon in the tenth month. I had stood indoors, where the sun streamed in, where it poured through an old glass bottle-stopper; the facets of it spread a party of light on the wall. I knew the physics of the trick and remained in thrall. Everything is illusion, coloured by perception. And lit, by design or accident, by this thrall. From us, through us: it matters not. Absorb, and surrender to the trick. It is beautiful.

Yesterday I walked in the small woods. Up the steep slips of fallen leaf. Found myself under a dome of tree cover. Something about it caught my attention - the circularity, the floor of dark leaves, when the rest of the woods is strewn with fern and bramble. There was only the sighs of autumn leaves to be heard, high above. I raised my eyes, un-expectant, to where an owl was asleep. Yellow eyes opened: we stared at each other. I willed it to read my questions. I have much to ask. Time paused. Then the owl flew. I clearly heard the brisk rustle of its feathers. I had never before woken an owl. I walked out of the cut field into redemptive rain. Just before home, the rain stopped. Out of the hedge, two ripe strawberries were gathered. In the night, bad dreams came. In the morning nothing factual remains, only the fear. Had the owl answered my questions? I hoped not. I went back to the small woods. Today the sun shone, the owl was not at home. Dog sprang a deer o

Ida and Dennis at West Bay I just wanted to listen to the wind and the fat trunked ash. The branches, leafless all spring, all summer; in autumn there is nothing to drop but weathered wood. A tree surgeon is booked. A gap in the skyline is coming. Ivy shimmies on the bare shoulders of our old giant. It stands where it has always stood, where once it was supple in the breezes that fly the length of this river valley. Solid seeming, patterned skeletal, neural, calmly falling to pieces. Seasons turn. Change comes. Unplanted, we make our paths through obstacles, and according to which view we seek. The roots of people are moveable, nourished by dreams. 8th September 1925, Burnley, Lancashire: a girl is born, a first child. Her name is Ida. Four more children follow her into this family. Through the 1930s where work and food are scare, she looks after this brood while her parents look for work. Things are shoeless, hungry. Two of her sisters take ill: they die. 1939:

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