Friday I stayed away Saturday I go late – it seems I need the breaks in visits allow for spaces to breathe. It’s sunny now after a cold and wet beginning. There are some windows through dead branches that I enjoy along the North path and I stop, believing my favourite arching view has gone, succumbed to decay or intervention – its only later on the way home that I realise I was standing at a different spot. I recognise another case of mistaken identity, as the foliage comes out on that miraculous branch suriving still after a massive tear across the trunk, is not Willow but Elder.
The tree at its ‘foot’ is a gothic vaulted Sycamore
I pass the apple at the well and look into the petal blown flowers, seeing no sign of forming fruits I wonder if that’s why I hadn’t noticed an apple here before. I wend on up through the gothic zone to the oak where I’m tempted to draw out my sketchbook and plot today’s co-ordinates
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I am on the ridge and from beneath Mama Oak I see the hawthorn shielded by the cliff and still dressed up in May blossom, making co-ordinates across the valley, s/he waves abundant arms over the stinging nettles rising up from below.
Yesterdays may flower scatterings have given way to willow, some still tenaciously hanging on, I don’t remember seeing such fluffy bunnies over such a long a long season of dispersal
It’s getting dark as I wander home
Sunday we cross the Glen to go to the shops I bring R over the heaping of oak shreddings and up the old wooden steps past the quinces on ‘The Mountain’ the steps are beginning to fray and rot back into the ground and top steps disappear into the undergrowth at the perimeter of the Resource Centre. I can’t tell if the steps line up with the curve of curbing on the verge, still visible in the summer growth
This is the place there would have been the practice trenches and the rifle range, so generations of kids would have been hunting for shells herebefore the turn of the century, I am told it was levelled to build the flats and so the Mountain doesn’t quite fit its status anymore
We cross the bridges and look at the ducks’ maze below, a paradise for getting lost.
Returning form our errands we come through the meadow R veers off to make a call and I bump into the other T , he shows me the garden he has planted in the Polar stump.