We’re always on one, a cusp, those of us who run too fast towards a something or a someone, or a dream. For now with my sensible hat one which, if I am honest, never did fit and always fell over one eye or both, we are on the cusp of a stormo dueblo. It dithers me, like you on the cusp of the unknowable. We will be here again and that’s for sure. We are already are, in a different dimension, among the squigilliounaria of the fictious confines and controls of social media. Most of it I can laugh at, but I am not 15 and lonely and rejected at school because I have specs, spots, big boobs, no boobs, white skin, black skin, big feet. Etcetera. Those kids are on the cusp every single day. Did we clock this as parents in our busy working lives? I didn’t.
Back to the storm. Today, I walked into an unnatural still in my friends, the trees. I stopped for a chat with the Horse Chestnut which always yellows before her sister a few feet away as if she thinks she is older, and she might be. She is also skinnier, older and grown in a water challenge. I admire her, and say so. Further up the track, and all alone, I meet stripped silver birch, hazels with few nuts. I have seen this before. A learned old guy told me that trees will produce what is required for the ahead of time, for the winter. No conkers either, or is it neither? So, in theory, there is less need for nuts.
I hear people talking though. Less nuts, oh dear, a loss, a fear. Honestly, I want to laugh. I/we pursued a dream and landed here, but even before that when we farmed in Norfolk, there were years of no nuts, no a lot of things, failed crops, the scant knickerless blank of fields failed. It was a cusp, of course it was. The horror of loss and lack and the fear of going again an almost joker in the midst. But we had really good workers, wonderful dynamic people who turned up every day on their own cusp, bringing their own hopes for being involved, valued and paid. We kept going, as we did up here in the tangles of island switcher winds and wildings and sudden capistrata. And I am glad we did. I remember the savings and the smiles and the come into the warm and the wild out-there crazy nights, the camaraderie, the togetherness, the sharing. What do we do when, as I hear, food will become short? Of course it will (duh), because thousands of fields burned in their wheat/barley/oat grow. Farmers are seriously on the cusp.
The thing that bothers me most is that far too many of us expect to be ‘provided for’ expecting that what we once had, the nuts and the fields of barley are somehow our right. They aren’t. I watch the sky, sense the birds and their changes, listen to the wild, walk into it. Check the nuts.
