Weather,wood and wool

Having risen early to try to record again the first seven minutes of the seventh chapter of the second book of The Well at the World's End, (alas and alack, I fear I am verily fed up unto the back teeth with it, forsooth), I find that, while I have worked out that it is probably the laptop fan which is causing the interfering whine on the soundtrack, even if I position the mic and myself differently to avoid this, the escalating winds of storm Imogen are really making far too much racket round the house for a quiet recording environment, or at least one in which I can concentrate enough to read aloud. So as I'm up already I'll start a post, since, touch wood, we still have internet connection, power etc.

I dislike high winds. Some of my earliest blog posts, I recall, were expressing anxiety about this meteorological fact of life, it must have been another windy winter nearly ten years ago. Especially I worried about what would happen if Victor's trees blew down on our house, in particular his largest chestnut tree. Changing bedrooms, so I heard the wind less and we were not directly under the predicted downward trajectory of said tree, and accepting the futility of trying to communicate this concern in any effective way to Victor have to some extent alleviated the fears, but the source of them has continued to grow, as trees will.

A week or so ago I encountered his remaining sister in the village, old Hélène, who is 96 and almost totally blind, outside the house, and she entered into her usual tirade against her brother and his trees and how inconsiderate and irresponsible he was to let them grow so near our house. This was one reason I had stopped trying to talk to Victor about them, I knew he had his sisters on his back pleading our case, and he didn't listen to them so why would he listen to me? Or maybe staying on friendly terms with him so he might just be concerned with our welfare might be more effective. One of the reasons Hélène, and their other sister, Marcelle who's in the retraite and Marie-Thérèse who used to live next door, gave for the undesirability of the trees was the amount of leaf litter and the way they blocked the light from the house. The leaves are a minor nuisance to clear up it's true, and make the road untidy, but in fact the effect on the light, which really is more from the screening effect of the coppiced shoots than the big tree, is something I love. The dancing, ever-changing filtered glow and dappled shade that plays through our windows and onto our walls as the sun moves round the house through the year, green in spring and gold in winter, making it into a great seasonal sundial, is a joy to me.

So I agreed with old Hélène but tended to shrug and laugh it off anyway, but then a day or so later, just before these spells of stormy winds moved in on us, two burly blokes with a couple of mighty chain saws and a piece of robust wheeled agricultural plant with a massive extending arm thing arrived. They held the tree in place with the arm and made short work of downing it onto Victor's patch and cutting the thickest part of the trunk into a couple of pieces. This was done in the darkling dusk (hence I didn't photograph the operation), with no ear protection or any other safety gear. Victor watched from a few paces off, and we watched from the window, while I formulated in my head the French for 'the monsieur has been crushed by a tree/cut his hand/arm/leg off/himself in two with a chainsaw', figuring I'd probably be able to get to the phone more quickly than Victor.

The latter, all ninety-four years and four foot eleven of him, has been having a whale of a time with his own chainsaw, axes, wedges etc, chopping the old tree up, as well as clambering about on a flimsy ladder trimming the remaining smaller ones. His daughters try to keep tabs on him but they don't live there, and he's a stubborn old git and will do what he wants anyway. When I told him on my way out to be careful up there he chuckled like a wicked gnome and carried on hanging off the ladder with one arm while sawing at a branch with the other. Tom had just given him a bottle of wine as a thank you for dispatching the tree, I don't know if he'd been drinking it. It was Chilean red not cider or calva so maybe he wasn't really interested, but his daughter looked appreciative anyway.

I clambered up the bank and took a photo of the section of the tree, then enlarged it and tweaked the contrast to count the rings. I've a feeling it wasn't the full bole at the base, so may have been only a coppiced shoot of an even older tree, but even so I make it about thirty-eight rings. It first saw the light when I was doing my O levels, was a mere sapling when I left school, at which time Victor was probably contemplating his retirement, and I've marked some other points:

Interesting to note it must have withstood the 1987 hurricane which flattened swathes of woodland here and took the roofs off most of the houses in the village, and laid low many fine old beeches in the park opposite my parents' house in Brighton, which I remember looking out at for long sad hours the February after when my father died. But then it was still quite a young tree then, and must have bowed but not broken, like the reed in the fable.

~

Changing the subject, my first lopapeysa! The design, called Antipodal, came from a recent book and is quite modern and atypical in some ways (including the rolled turtle neck), though the construction is traditional. You knit a big tube for the body up to the underarms, two small tubes for the arms, then join them all together into one yoke which you decrease in size, changing colours and making the patterned bit, up to the neck. So there's very little making up or sewing to do and all the fun stuff, patterning and shaping, comes near the end, so you have it to look forward to and don't lose interest. They're also fairly inexpensive and quick to make, as the wool is quite bulky, though this is made from the thinner Lopi-lite version.

In fact the yoke is really too deep, so the sleeves join too low and if I wear a jacket over it that pushes it up under the arms a fold appears under the neck. I can now see how this might be avoided, and half-considered unravelling some way back and reshaping it, but decided I'd rather just wear it as it is and go on and make another one, which I have already set about doing, though from other wool than Icelandic, which is something of a come-down since lopi wool is extraordinarily gorgeous: tough, seemingly harsh but luminous, unique and surprisingly warm and comfortable once you're inside, just like Iceland in fact. However, I can't really justify sending away for more of it while I've stacks of stashed stuff already, but then there'll be satisfying possibilities of arithmetical adjustments to allow for the different yarn. The study and perfecting of this form of knitting is much appreciated and has a large and enthusiastic following; I can vouch for how compulsive it is.

Reading up on the history of Icelandic knitting, I've learned that while wool and knitted garments have long been an important part of their culture and economy, the patterned yoke pullover is not so very old, dating from the mid-twentieth century, and they were originally called Greenlandic sweaters, not because they came from Greenland but because the patterned yoke resembled the decorative neck elements of some traditional Greenland folk costumes. 

So there you go.

Paris: purple trees

I've seen paulownias before, but only really as single specimens, now and then, and of course when they aren't in flower one isn't particularly likely to notice them. The experience of rounding a corner and finding a whole square of trees which appeared to have been painted purple was a new one, which seemed to add a fairy whimsicality to the city.

 

It was pointed out to us that they are really only in this state for a week or so of the year, so we were lucky to be there at just that moment. Which might be a(nother) good reason to go to Paris in the first week of May every year.

To look at foxglove trees in bloom
Twenty springs is little room

As Housman didn't say, but Haussmann might have done.

Three beautiful things

Two from yesterday, one from today.

1) The way through the woods. This is one of my favourite bits of road to drive through, as I do quite frequently, but most especially in spring or autumn, because the leaves of the beech trees come and go a little earlier than those of the chestnuts they grow amongst, so you have a sense of the first green flames flickering and the last golden ones dying down amongst the not yet kindled or burned out logs of the chestnut trunks. This is one of the things I like about living here where the predominant tree species are chestnut, oak and then, less frequently, beech.

As for the road, it's not so easy to stop on, so I've never really taken photos here. I made the effort this time as it was brighter at last after days and days of rain and fog, and I suddenly realised that autumn would be gone before I knew it. When we first came here, it seemed to me that autumn colour didn't really happen, and I missed it, but in fact what really often happens is that the wet, dull, windy weather of November can whip the last of it away while we huddle indoors and don't see the going of it.

So I got out of the car at the parking spot and and walked back some way to photograph the vista I admire so often while driving.

Typically, however, I found my eyes straying downward to the leaf litter.

The parking spot is under a big stone cross which, I think, marks the boundary between Quessoy and Hénon. Soize's husband, the erudite local historian and master crêpier Quercus (the town's name, Quessoy, coming originally from the Latin for oak, in which the place abounded), tells of how when he was a nipper, the children of the two communes would appoint a time to meet under the stone cross for a battle, a ritualised and generally bloodless affair, I think, superseded in adolescence by a rivalry centring on the differing types of scooter they rode according to the franchises held by the two towns' garages. 

For me, the spot was for a long time one of the Stations of the Mol, one of those places where, however sound asleep she appeared to be on the back seat, Molly would mysteriously know that we were approaching, and sit up and bark for a walk. As she grew older, the walk wasn't much of a walk, at least not for me, as all she really wanted to do was get out of the car and walk round and round in circle sniffing at things; but even a very little time before she left us, I stopped here and opened the windows for her and she lifted her head and took in the the smells with recognition.

There are more photos on a web album.

~

2) A box of light at Quai de Rêves. We, the both of us unusually, met up with Iso and Princeling and, unusually, Pascal their paterfamilias, to take in a dance show in Lamballe. A combination of one-woman dance and a fairly uniquely conceived form of digital art, a kind of cube of translucent membrane on which were projected forms and patterns of light, abstract, figurative and ... whatever letters and numbers are, not calligraphic, ummm, typographic? Anyway. These seemed to respond to her movement, but I'm still not certain they did, I think perhaps she followed them, since after the performance the audience were invited to come and play in the box themselves, but it didn't seem quite evident how to make it respond. It was fun trying anyway. Tom was entranced by the dancer (he either is by contemporary dance or hates it) and sought her out afterwards to express a tongue-tied thanks and shake her hand, Iso was moderately pleased, but as a dancer and performer herself said she wasn't entirely satisfied by the dancer's 'vocabulary of movement'. Princeling was only somewhat entertained and started to fidget (the chairs were a bit uncomfortable and it was a bit late) but he had been to a proper restaurant beforehand without a kids' menu and had eaten pintâde and café gourmand without the café, and most amazing of all his teacher was at the show (that one's primary teacher might exist beyond the classroom is a fact fairly bouleversant to a seven-year-old) so it wasn't a bad evening for him overall. I don't know what Pascal thought, he and Iso always seem to get caught up in a bit of networking at these events so I guess that's a positive for them, but for myself I was just happy that everyone was doing OK and the performance was interesting enough and not too long. I didn't take any pictures of it as I'm not sure that's good form and anyway I wanted to watch it, but here are some I took afterwards during the audience participation bit:

The last one is Princeling, with his face blurred because it was dark and I wasn't using flash.

It wasn't a long show, so there was time for a very light meal and yesterday's blog post before we left, the drive there and back (oddly, my eyes, not great with night vision, seemed much better adapted to the road after watching the show than before), a bit of time to socialise, the show itself, then cheese and wine and telly and knitting when we got back, so it seemed a really very long and full and satisfying evening.

~

3) The chimney sweep's dog.  Having the chimney swept is indeed a beautiful thing in itself; the fire burns clean and bright afterwards and there's that good feeling that something cleansing that needs to be done has been done.  The young chap who does it is calm and careful and hard-working and has some powerful kit for the job. But an unlooked for bonus was this fellow who he had in the cab of his van:

An American cocker spaniel puppy. 

You can bring him in, I said, trying not to sound too desperately eager.  But he said no, he was fine, and in fact the vacuum cleaner he operates from the van is very noisy in the house but the cab is well insulated, and anyway I think he's learning to be a good road companion, and we know from Molly experience that you need to be consistent and not give them mixed messages about when  they do and don't come out of the vehicle. But he took him out afterwards and let us all say hello. He's only two and a half months old, so he's doing very well coming out and about to work with his boss and waiting and so on, though I did notice there was a thick protective sheet on the seat!

We agreed that the most important thing for them is to be with you, not to be alone and to be taken along. The sweep was clearly very besotted with him and very proud - his mum and dad were both champions, he told us. As before, it was rather dark for the photos, and as with Princeling, he didn't care to keep still.

What's his name? - I asked.

Joe, - said the sweep, and grinned - Cocker!

~

Final day of daily posting tomorrow. 

Spring happenings

Just reporting in here. Tom was given dispensation to leave his hermit's cell for a few days to make a trip to the UK for eyes, ears and to look in on family and a friend - there are some very nice pictures of him here at Natalie's.  All was well in his absence; Molly pottered on in her blind, deaf and creaky fashion, didn't get stuck in too many corners or disgrace herself on any carpets, and the weather was good enough that I could leave doors open while she lay in a pile of dirty old leaves outside - her couch of choice on such occasions - long enough for me to snatch a shower a couple of times. I took advantage of uninterrupted access to the big computer and its software to work on one or two things I'd been thinking about, knitted a bit, read a bit, did some yoga with my yoga buddies and made a trip out to the shops with J, and by the time I'd done that, he was back, with hot cross buns (we didn't make any this year), new glasses and a cheerful mien, and here we are again.

A reasonable spring here, still quite chilly. Our swallows are back at last, somewhat late - the residents rather than the occasional members of the advance parties, who passed through a month or so ago, and who I like to think of making their way on up to the Western Isles of Scotland, to nest between the beams of the tiny chapel by the sea on Iona, though they're probably just going to Wolverhampton or somewhere. After the rather long, wet, dark winter, many things were delayed while others are early because it's not been cold, so it's one of those everything-at-once kind of springs.  So here are just a few sycamore leaves unfurling and dandelion clocks - I think it's never been such a year for dandelions, but perhaps I think that every year.

Oh, and a bug.

Eve of departure, and the Moncontour magnolia.

Little more I can do now: the alarm is set for 3 am tomorrow morning; I have cereal bars and fruit juice and Kendal Mint Cake and books on the Kindle; I have packed everything I can, unpacked most of it at least once because I still needed it and packed it again, written extensive notes to myself about things I have done perfectly easily before or could very easily have kept in even my increasingly sieve-like head anyway, emptied everything that needs emptying and charged everything that needs charging, written my will... 

Molly has extra meat for tomorrow's dinner and Tom has been given special dispensation to have a Mars bar for breakfast on the way back from the station at 5 am.

On the way back from further last minute provisioning (done at least in part to give Mol a ride in the car to distract her from rolling furiously and indignantly on the carpet having had her ears cleaned, another job that couldn't possibly wait till I got back, after all, that moment, just 36 hours after my departure, will be a world away), I decided to do something I have been meaning to do every spring for the last seven years, that is, photograph the magnolia tree in flower on the ramparts of Moncontour. 

This isn't such a difficult thing to do, but difficult enough, since a clear view to it can only be obtained from a point on a fairly narrow winding road up the hill away from the town where stopping the car is very dangerous - not that this prevents smitten tourists, sometimes in camping cars, from doing so anyway.  Since the only place you can safely stop and park is several hundred meters further back up the hill, and there's no easy turning, I hardly ever think to do so in time, at least not when I have the camera with me. Anyone who knows a magnolia tree knows that their moment of early spring glory is a brief one, and year after year I've failed to get around to taking the photos.  This time, though, I thought to do so in advance, 

 And since to look at things in bloom,

Fifty Springs is little room...

Sadly, it was not a very bright spring day and rather too late in the morning, so the contrast of lights and shadows which show the picturesquely irregular shapes and planes of the ancient town's walls and roofs to best advantage, and which seem to make the magnolia stand out all grand and emblazoned and Tree-of-Gondor-like, was absent, but you can't have everything. And perhaps that perception of the tree is enhanced by the way it rather flashes upon the eye, surprising every time.  

In the long view it's scarcely noticeable, in fact.

The yellow specks on the walls below it are primroses.

The one above caught the great flocks of jackdaws and pigeons which swirl around the old bell tower, built by the Spanish in the Wars of Religion in the 16th century. These birds are a perpetual headache in terms of their destructiveness, since all they want to do is roost and poo all over said tower, which was lately restored at great expense of time and money by a special firm of scaffolders and builders from Provence who specialise in such lofty edifices, but they are very much a part of the atmosphere of the place.

By approaching on foot, and by climbing up on a wall and focussing the camera between trees, I found there was another spot with a view onto it.  The higher eye-level shows more interest in the roof shapes, but also the rather dour modern extension to the old religious hospital building on the hill behind.

Unlike Houseman's narrator, I've had my fifty springs, rather than anticipating them. It seems important to try to get round to at a few of the things one hasn't got round to yet, at least some of the smaller ones even if the bigger ones remain out of reach, and even if they don't quite stand out as brightly in reality as they are in the mind.  As a dear friend said, now's the time.

A meditation on the death of trees

A brief clearing and a rainbow the other week, making the birch trees shine very brightly, behind them a solitary, leaning stem of the eucalyptus remaining, the other two having split and blown down in the weather we've had.  The birch trees have always done well, their shapes are pleasant and their white and pink peeling bark has always been interesting. We appreciate trees, and any plants, here that thrive without making demands.  A pretty miniature Japanese maple we nurtured fretfully and laboriously finally refused to make it through the heatwave of 2003, and we let it go with some regret but also a shade of relief (only briefly, guiltily, touching on how its demanding and temperamental nature did remind us just a little of that of the person who gave it to us...)

A couple of blogging friends have commented lately on trees either blown or taken down, and how they feel rather bad about not feeling bad enough about the matter, as it were: not missing them enough or not feeling guilty enough about having been complicit in the act of arboricide, appreciating rather the access of light, the securing of sanitation, the relief at the absence of a rather unprepossessing vegetal specimen and the opportunity to plant something better.

Trees are of course marvellous creatures, which should be treasured and cared for; rare, ancient and magnificent ones, often with wondrous histories - churchyard yews that were there before Christianity, black walnuts that contain stories of empires, sequoias you could drive a car through, massive kauris that hold a whole ecosystem like a Land of Green Ginger in their branches - should indeed be preserved wherever possible. Trees do essential things and we can't do without them, the destruction of forests and woodlands and hedgerows is an abomination which we should and will rue, of course; trees, in the plural, areas of woodland, tree-based habitats and ecosystems, should be nurtured and not destroyed and despoiled through our greed, fear, violence and ignorance.

Yet it's true one can get too anthropomorphic and sentimental about individual trees. Perhaps it's partly because they have a somewhat human attitude, standing there holding their arms out and up as though in worship or welcome, or because on average they live something like as long as we do (so the ones that live considerably longer inspire us with a comprehensible wonder); perhaps their seasonal cycles of growth and withdrawal from life seem to mirror and sympathise with our own moods and life patterns. Of all plants they seem the most like discrete, individual beings.

But they're not.  You don't go cutting the end of a human limb off and expect it to happily grow lots of extra fingers, or for the remaining limbs to flourish, with added vigour.  A rowan which we got so fed up up with refusing to thrive, a scanty, rusty, sickly thing taking up space, that we chopped it down to about a metre, meaning to get the rest out later, has since leaved and blossomed and even fruited on multiple shoots with a healthy lushness ever since.  Eucalyptus trees like ours which split and shed their branches and stems so drastically do so all the time according to need in the harsh climates where they originate.  A single eucalyptus isn't really an individual organism at all, even though we plant them as such, a eucalyptus forest is. Trees reproduce in various ways, but many will do so vegetatively by chance or our design, so that suckers and cuttings and grafts and layers produce a clone, or simply an extension, of the parent plant, so to what extent can they be considered separate, or the original stock to have died? Even the seeded offspring of many are spread with such indiscriminate profligacy that they can't possibly all reach maturity, and no parent tree grieves for them; we are forever pulling out (or trying to, they are very tenaciously rooted) and griping about the weed ash tree saplings which poke themselves out of hedges all over the place, seeded from keys tossed down from the handsome old tree up the road.  We are, I think, still burning the last of its sibling, or perhaps parent, which our next door neighbours of the time had chopped down, tired of the soggy leaf litter, the moody shadow, miasmic green damp and general encroachment of it against their house.

Of course, this almost deathless state of plant existence, the boundaries between organisms and the span of their lives being fluid, porous, undifferentiated, is a wonder in itself, that the web of their ecosystems, the community as a whole, is more important than the individual within it, is a worthy subject for reflection and meditation, and may hold lessons for us, but only to a point.  Our awareness of our separateness, our aloneness and the mysterious intangibility of the love that connects us with other humans, or other animals, and the corresponding sense of absence and ensuing grief when they die, the very differences between our particular bonds and theirs, belongs to us, make us what we are.

Furthermore, trees don't witness our histories, though they are present as they come and go, that's a role we have projected onto them. Frankly, they don't give a damn, and why should they? I wouldn't presume to deny that they have their own spirituality, but we're kidding ourselves to pretend we can comprehend it.

And yet and yet, of course we do come to love particular trees, and they do take on meaning for us, and we do feel sadness when they go, sometimes; because the meaning things take on for us, the role they play in our spiritual lives, is generated by ourselves, does not make it untrue. I'd be very sorry to see the ash tree whose cuckoo brats lodge in our hedges gone, or the lopsided chestnut on the corner of our field. And the passing of the box elder tree, which occurred around the time I was fourteen, was a memorable and quite poignant event.  Box elders are quick growing weed trees in north America where they originate, something of a nuisance largely because of the plagues of eponymous bugs they shelter, I understand.  Our box elder, though, which we only ever called the maple tree, was a unique and long established specimen from well before I was born or my family moved to the house. Until later years, and then only in France, I don't recall ever seeing another like it, though here they are frequent, and I've stayed in a place where they sprouted amongst the undergrowth in hardy abundance. But being dioecious, and our tree being the only one in the area, she, and it was a she, had no offspring.  The delicate bunches of winged keys were always hollow, no matter how many of them I split open in the hopes of finding a seed - nothing sentimental, just an interest in the idea of making a new maple tree sprout as the numerous horse chestnuts in our boundary hedge did from the conkers we brought home.

The box elder must have been a good age, and was a fairly remarkable size for its species, and had probably more or less reached the end of its span.  One night of high winds between Christmas and New Year, with a house full of family, we had a call from a neighbour: a tree was down in our garden.  My nearest brother was enjoying the enviable privilege of sleeping in our small touring caravan, parked under the box elder tree.  He wasn't in it at the time, but would have been an hour or so later, and if the tree had fallen a few feet to the right, the 'van would have been crushed.  However, nothing, not the Bramley apple tree to one side nor the patch of raspberry canes to the other, nor the old brick wall at the bottom of the garden, was seriously or even noticeably damaged.  That the old girl had laid herself down so gently and considerately seemed a not unremarkable act of grace.

We enjoyed chopping her up, my nephew and I playing about with old bow saws and axes before someone borrowed a chainsaw and did the job properly.  The coal shed was satisfyingly full of logs until we left the house a couple of years later.

I didn't know that the picture below existed, but discovered it among the family albums a while after I started this blog.  A hand-developed black and white, rather than an Instamatic snap, I imagine it was taken by my curmudgeonly bachelor uncle who must have been speaking to us that Christmas.  My nieces, who sorted and archived the photos in one heroic, kindly and creative swoop over another Christmas much later, after my father had died and my mother in the process of clearing out and moving house, saw fit to keep it carefully among the images of our births, marriages and deaths, our ancestors and childhoods and family pets. The photograph's existence and survival move me as much as the passing of the tree itself.

~

Currently back in Mayenne at the home of my brother and sister-in-law (and Belle the cat, of course), but feeling assured of return home tomorrow.  My brother has a dressing on his head, a rather impressive Frankensteinesque scar between neck and shoulder, and a migrating black eye, but despite this slightly zombie-like appearance is extraordinarily nonchalant and even cheerful, and (perhaps a little too) eager to be driving and conducting business as usual, so that's a relief.  I've tended to shunt everything over to the other side of this trip so have a schedule rather full of root canal work, mammogram (routine), teaching and dog haircuts to catch up with in the next week, but feel, hope, that the year is on the up and so are we, and will be back here before too long. 

Scanning the leaves

Working outside, raking up was a wholesome and soothing activity.  But again, I missed the light to take any pictures, and it was mostly rather gloomy today anyway.  So I grabbed a handful of the fallen liquidambar leaves just before dark, which falls quickly these nights, and brought them in to play with.  I never sweep these up anyway, as I think the vivid patch of litter on the ground around the tree is as good a part of its display as anything, and let them blow away or get mowed up in their own good time.

My printer doesn't do those amazing sharp, deep scans with the black background that Marja-Leena's does.  I did it with the lid up, then messed about with some Picasa editing:

this one (above) simply has the contrast and saturation turned up a little,

this is with 'cross process' effect,

posterised,

black and white,

'pencil sketch',

and with inverted colours.

~

And that must be all for tonight.  What is frustrating me rather, so that I don't feel I'm keeping up very well, is not so much the daily posting but not getting around other people's blogs, when I know so many of you are also upping your posting rate and doing lovely things, and still finding the time to get here and offer me succour and encouragement. It just seems as if the odd five minutes or half-hour that I can snatch here I'm using for putting up a daily post, or sometimes trying to do justice to the comments you leave by replying.  However, we're two-thirds through the month and I've kept it up so far, so I'm resolved to finish.  Thanks for staying with it too!

Winter woods: beech, spruce, chestnut.

Occasionally, some sunlight fell upon the path, which was ... scattered with the mysterious dried-up fruits of various trees fashioned into little brown toys and emblems, which crackled pleasantly underfoot.


(Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice - 
Can't say I remember a huge amount about this novel, except it's based in part on the somewhat unlikely premise that someone on LSD would throw himself out of a window in the belief that he could fly.  But the little crackling toys and emblems on the forest floor have always stayed with me).

There's so little for the camera to play with at this grey-green-brown time of year, though the light can be good when it shows itself.  Despite mounds and layers of gently majestic cloud, and flocks of larks and lapwings (fewer of these than other years), I tend to keep my eyes down, looking at sepia shapes of leaves and husks, livid, waxy discs and domes of late fungi, thick bunches of emerald sorrel.  There have been no frosts to speak of, though; flakes of gold and bronze leaves still hover on the trees, and fuchsias and roses keep on flowering in the garden, along with the hellebores opening and the daffodils coming up.

Old things, still lovely, linger, new ones emerge beside them. The light lengthens.