Happy Midsummer
....looking back, looking forward, standing still
June: Summer Solstice
The north wall faces south, every handmade brick taxed, and mortared to its neighbour. Three fire houses are home to shadows and cobwebs, the crackle of dried leaves. Picnic benches squat at angles among young apple trees clustered with fattening fruit. On a quiet weekday only four cars (two German, two Japanese) are parked in the bays where vegetables were raised and nurtured from seed. While we eat our lunch, we attempt a diagram of the lost rows – lettuce, spring onions, the beginnings of marrows, broad beans.
Much of the crop would have been forced by a careful hierarchy of gardeners; at the bottom, women, weeding, hoeing, picking off caterpillars. Women, always bent, the bones in their backs burning from the inside. The sound of the river behind us might be the spiked tips of their leather gloves scratching at gravel paths, hooking out anything that dared to grow there, upholding God’s own order.
Our mouths are full of flies, nameless insects that catch in our throats. Hard to swallow. Too. Hot. No. Air. Under our feet, grass dizzy with buttercups, self-heal. A flight of steps rises into nowhere – the path up to the Hall, erased, nothing left but the idea.
What good will come of us singing the praises of car parks that used to be kitchen gardens and kitchen gardens that used to be car parks, adding our voices to the bees’ buzz under the old roof slates – still here, still enjoying warm pollen cupped in the curves of red brickwork, sweet resplendent lime.
We fill a cotton bag with the frothy heads of elderflowers, take them home to soak with lemon and sugar for cordial. Summer stoppered in a bottle. Won’t last past August.
From The Knucklebone Floor (Smokestack, 2022)
