So here I find myself at the apex and cumulation of my bloggings on the Glen, Gleann na Phúca or, as I have come to know it, the Enchanted Valley. This day of the shortest night.
I enter the Glen at dusk on the 20th, Sunday, the pink jacket is still thrown in the bushes; a semi-permanent goal. There is an interruption in the skin of the new green bin by the snake, a punch and arching scrape, down to metal in the reflective surface, T’s garden is still doing ok nearby, in the Poplar stump while the singular yellow flag is doing its best by the water’s edge and the swamp cypresses are getting their green on. Copper sequins scatter across the the ground near the unpopulated pedestal (and it’s not hard to make out in them the constellation of Orion) and oats are gently thrown on flagstones by the ponds for the birds. Trees conduct one another in their endless symphony, and frame the gaps where the people walk; the scarified bark at the base of the Elm, crying its bark tears for the life that tries each year to rise up its dead-old channels.
The white walls are fast becoming my frames of reference, like pieces of a jigsaw that want to connect and are separated by the gaps of the missing pieces in between. So through the painted gatepost out of the engineer’s place and on to the painted cement conglomerate – an invitation to the belly-connection over the rushing water, and the cage of the hatch which somehow soothes, and where now I know sometimes lives the Glen Dipper. Nearby a thread, hazard tape umbilical from the dumping ground, and a buried part of another old stone edifice; crossings and liftings of vegetation across the skin of the valley, the plants having public conversations for all to hear. Now up onto the high ground where I find slow-moving life forms, and dangle a while in the branches of the Mother Oak, looking across to the elders in full bloom, and the wavings of the bare armed Elms. Homeward bound I find the shuttlecock I placed earlier on the oak stump is still resting there, and the abandoned bike still hedged, another cypress shows its tight little nuts on the corner into home.
some slow moving time with a slug….