Northumberland
(Written at Burnhopeside Walled Garden, Co Durham, March 19th 2022)
Between the kitchen window and the door to the garden, sheltering in the column of space between, a cotoneaster climbs the wall in stiff sprays, a dogged certainty branching up and out over the stone front of the house. Its neatly formed branches form a tight mesh, hung with clods of lichenous growth that arrive from nowhere, yet cover the twigs in seas of brittle grey fibres.
Figments of air, these lichens speak of the slow passage of time, the hidden and the incremental, and the quiet formation of all living things. They dance with the elements and grow in the same world I move in, and that I pause to see when there is time enough to stand and receive all that I am part of.
I know the understated presence of these lichens by the kitchen door, their whorls of wire wool, a whole universe of atoms loosely distributed across the wall, means that I live in a place with clean air. The same air that cuts the garden with slicing cold in winter and roars over the trees behind the house in storms. And that gives life to all I know and love here, breathing through the entirety of existence. And me with it. Testimony to what? A slow endurance, the quiet presence of all that I fail to see and take for granted in this jumbled world.
One winter, fieldfares came to the windowsill unexpectedly, so hungry for berries they formed a brief still life on the threshold of our lives, a theatre of red chests gorging on what was left – the last feast of winter, stripping the cotoneaster back to its grey bones . They left behind all those ragged cloaks of fossilised hair, coating each sprig with impossible webs of papery fibres, like the work of bees, those invisibly formed combs of alchemistic magic, to protect and line nests, and be carried with unceremonious purpose in the bills of blackbirds to some other unknown and secretive place.
