gardening

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Island Blog – A Barrel of Soil

Sometimes I can sit watching wallpaper, times I feel I am looking out through shutters, thin pencils of light, bodies moving by in a glimpse of swish and fabric, the lift of laughter, a catch of words shared close like comfort. Baubles in the dark, a winter of the soul. Sometimes. Not all the time. And, if everyone is ever honest, so does everyone. We just don’t talk about it. So not British. It is as if we would rather pretend we are always ‘fine’. which is ridiculous because the effort required to sustain such an elevation is impossible.

Talking of effort and elevation, I met them both in an old dustbin half full of soil. Two mice. They will have been drawn in by my spill of bird seed some days ago, hungry. They could slide in, easy, but the plastic and perpendicular walls proffering the out of in will have outwitted them. As I filled feeders a morning or two ago, I saw a flash of movement and focussed. They looked up, big brown eyes, stilled in question. Oh dear, I said, softly. They showed me a load of jumping and failing. I noticed a wee circle of cooried earth where they just might have rested and it smiled me, the resourcefulness. Everyone needs a wee rest after a deal of futile jumping. The first time I found them, I lifted and lugged the heavy bin out to the garden, tipping gently until the pair of them slid unto safety. Good, I thought. All done I thought. This morning the pair of them were back having learned nothing at all and I told them so, albeit sotto voce. Then I realised something. This is ongoing. They are cold. I have seed. They are looking. They are dynamic survivors. In my own home there is evidence of mice and I have no fear of that. A new hole in a carpet against the skirting. A skitter in the night. Not new for a farmer’s wife/widow. I don’t like it, but it is as it is. So I found a piece of old wood and canted it like a ladder so the mice can escape. They did. It thinks me.

In the sometimes of shutters and striations of light and winters, when we might be looking out and seeing only slivers of life, it might be time to notice, even as the critics tick like clocks on speed in a mind. We forget to rest at all in this cultural and manic rush for success (which means money) success elevated in entirely the wrong place. It is people who matter, kindness twogether (hallo new word). It’s conversation in a shop, a queue, a train station. It’s a removal of earpods and ears open. It’s about looking about without fear and noticing this old man over there, the tricky issue this woman is having with her big suitcase, the problem this mother or father is having with a double buggy and a noisy dog. It’s about putting aside a personal agenda and actually engaging with living, loving, lost and friendless humans. It’s about sharing meals, inviting in. It’s about risking a dirty mark on the carpet of a sterile life. My generation lived this way. I am hopeful, as are those wee mice in my barrel of soil.

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Island Blog – A Winter and the Unlight

It wasn’t at first, this morning, raining I mean. In fact it was light and brightish, although not the bright of summer. the sky an upload of smurr and cloud blobs looking depressed, buildings braced somehow on hilltops already a slipstick, for me anyway, the grass an already skid. The track potholes, recently filled with nasty grey sharps set the labradors a-shimmie as they navigated safe passage around them to avoid cut pads. We crunch on in protective boots, talking, checking the labs, looking out, looking up. This dimlight of winter, when skies proffer less, we humans miss the light of light. Although many talk of hibernation, we are not hedgehogs. Light is precious, not just a bit of it, but all of it and the intensity matters. It thinks me.

The thing about a lack of light, the rightlight over time, is that we don’t notice the happening of it. One morning, let’s say, we suddenly notice wrinkles, or sunken cheeks, and we astound. What on earth is this me looking back at me, she who for many months looked just fine? Winter is a baring. Winter isn’t the whole truth so don’t believe that. I, without makeup am a lizard right now, a cave dweller. It will pass. Ok, so that given, what do we do with the now of now? As the cold or the rain or both attempt to pound us into sludge creatures, we have a choice. We always do. And, by the way, anyone who says they don’t care about how they look in winter is lying.

I went out today to a Community Orchard Advent Thing. It was marvellous, everyone dressed, not for the Arctic, but for the Wet. Stalls proffering ideas and help on how to make natural decorations, pans frying bacon and sausage for rolls, hot punch provided, so many inventive ideas. I stayed a while, as many more arrived. Community brings a light to the unlight, and it matters. I forget how I look. Turning up, showing up is what matters and, as I left, passing others walking or driving in, umbrellas, waterproofs, it thought me this. Who gives a shit how I look? Answer? Nobody, because I came, and so did all the others living in the Unlight. That’s the way to navigate Winter.

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Island Blog – Herstory

I have two new geraniums. I have lived with, and looked after, for decades, the salmon pink geraniums beloved and nurtured by my mother-in-law, for almost fifty years. Who knew a plant could survive that long! Anyway, I inherited them, loads of them in pots, and all healthy as fitballs. My word. I didn’t, I promise, try, not never, to let them die, even though their presence overwhelmed me at times, many times. They just grew strong and green, producing flowers the whole damn summer and beyond. Even after her death, my mother-in-law I mean, in 2002, I still had five, no six, no seven, in her conservatory. Back then this conservatory (such a clumsy word) had no warmth in the winter months, so she brought them in and cared for them somewhere in this little stone-built home, still caring, still checking they would survive. I admire that. Her story with her geraniums, her green fingers. She knew everything about plants and gardens. This, btw, is not about her, even if it might look that way. I just went off on the geranium/mother-in-law thing. Moving on.

The two new ones. They are not salmon pink. To be honest, I am very tired of salmon pink. I want red. The ladies arrived, a bit discombobulated with all that dark travel, the shucking of delivery people who don’t know what’s in there. I let them sit in my open-mouthed garage for a day or two before replanting. From the width and strength of the stalks I clocked no newbie, no flop. These girls know themselves. I may have got them wrong. I put them in bigger pots, brought them in because out there on this island of bonkers weather, ‘in’ is safe. They rebelled. Their older leaves grew spots and stayed spotty, talking to other newer leaves, so that they spotted up too. I watch them.

Today they asked me for more space. Ah! I get it. I had placed one beside a well-established orange tree, and the other perhaps too close to an equally established ficus tree. Domination. I missed that. I moved them, as they asked me to. No plants want to be close to another. I see it often on my walks through Tapselteerie. The fight for light, for space, the ultimate diminish of one. And I say, I do, out loud, I see you. Do what you can, do your very best. You are beautiful even where you are.

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Island Blog – Winding my Way up

Happy Easter to you all. A new beginning, the chance to change direction, to question old thinks, spouted from mouths a generation or two old, and definitely dead because times change, and situations alter facts and circumstances. Thing is to notice all this, and to adapt as best we can, no, better. Let’s be honest here. Nobody has an easy stroll through life, even if we imagine there are those who do. They don’t. It just looks like it.

It isn’t easy to make a change, not one that appears huge and as far away as another planet. However, it is possible to stop, notice, think, assess and then initiate a first brave step. I don’t like this place, person, dynamic, circumstance, let’s say. I can already hear the fall down all those steps of expectation. Clunk, ouch, clunk, big ouch, and so on. Ok, there might be a clunk or two, or three, maybe four, but if we refuse to accept whatever control is controlling, we will find strength. I promise that. It hurts for a while, but once the light comes in, it really comes in.

In the wild, nature has a dynamic shift and shrift. I see it every day I walk in the woods, along the basalt and granite coastline, I see the way those who have landed in a place which no longer suits them change things. Wild flowers that lined the track, which, in the interests of wide-vehicled vehicles, were dug out and discarded, now appear further back on the bank, or, even between the stones of a drystone wall. I actually laugh out loud on seeing them, my smile wide as a banana, and I crouch down to welcome them, their tenacity, their sneaky over-winter move beneath the cold ground. They refuse to be less than they were, than they are. You will not take us out, they say. It thinks me, a lot, as I walk on.

This afternoon after a lovely uplifting church service with people and singing and words, I decide to chop some wood. It isn’t all that dry, to be honest, and needs chopping into notquitesplinters. I’m game. I check the stack, notice the twists, the tricky bits, the very wet collars around the fallen trees, because these measured logs formed big trees once, hosting bird nests, sheltering humans in rainfall, protecting mosses and wildflowers from sunburn. Respect. I select a log, fix it on my block, so old, so scarred, such a friend. Anyway, moving on. I position, raise my axe, whack it down. Ah, I know that sound. This is not going anywhere, but my whack, even now, is dynamic, ferocious, driven, and, unfortunately stuck. My efforts to separate axe from wood is a right battle. I had to employ a metal wedge and a mell.

This is not the point, although I did free all of us from this tricksy mix. What I noticed after was the twist and lean, the reach and the change of direction in this tree. You had no light. You noticed that. You decided to change direction. You wound your way up, so slow, so long waiting, so hopeful for change, so trusting in it.

You marvel me.