1. This is the large time, the growing time, the expanding time. Light builds, pushed to the limits of each day. I sleep, in light. I wake, in light. I doubt a night has even passed until I remember the last sound of the evening hours. A thrush, two lines at a time, repeating his first, word-perfect each time. A playful sound, then a rising refrain, an electric tune, then a cascading song. I saw him yesterday at our back door, with his complicated dabs of cream and buff. He returned to sing me to sleep. This morning, the window blinds glow with morning sunlight, then dim to the grey of slate in a moment. It swells again, the world full of jittering potential. And now it recedes once more, the world left flat, with no horizon of hope.
2. Rain fell in the tiny dark hours. I dreamt of sudden torrents, an epic flood that carried me through a forest, waiting for the moment of impact against the sharp limbs of a pine. I woke instead to a damp green clean world. The dust bowl of our garden has swallowed all signs of rain, the water sinking slowly between the tender new roots of apple, pear and plum. Sun has returned. It glances off the car windscreen like burning magnesium, lights the wisteria leaves that brush our window, skitters around dots of Cotinus seed, sending out puffs of smoke. A day left of this burgeoning, swelling, flaring year, but none of us will notice the difference. The earth will pause before it begins its steady then quickening roll back towards the dark.
3. For once, it feels like midsummer. Summer has been long already, furnishing countless days with incandescence and warmth. Limbs have browned, roses have bloomed, grass has grown without rest. Horizons have extended, with dreams skipping into view for brief dark moments caught between walls of light. Everything is on, out, moving, surging forward. My neighbour’s cancer grows. My nails do not. The sparrows bring their babies to feast at our deck each morning. What does it mean to be light at this time of the year? To live in the light, where action and movement, work and rest, all play out beneath a luminous sky. It is not always like this. I must learn to live lightly in this light, to lessen my grip on these brightest of days, to allow them to soar like rooks and be content if they come back to roost.
4. I sit and merge with warm air, no distinction between my skin and the air, beneath a towering column of atmosphere. It sends insects from our land up into the curtilage of sky, which send swallows to patrol the edges, which swoop beneath curtains of clouds that pass before the sun. Shadow is cast, now sun burns, then dull shadow returns. I read the words on the screen: winter is coming. The ultimate shadow, for which nothing will prepare us. Words swim. Jet stream, instability, switch off, without warning. A shadow grips my heart, loss beyond imagining. Do the birds that sing in the leaves know this change is coming? Do we know, fully and with duty? I cannot hold all of this. This shadow knows no limits, its dim fingers coming for us all one day. Until that day, I choose to send light and love to the swallows who traverse my small window of sky, not knowing, not waiting, just being. How could a world be lost that knows how to make a speck of light shine from a girl’s lips? To know it all, every glint of light and every smudge of shadow, to say I was there, and dreamed with the swallows that day, of sky and morning and light, endless light.
5. I am weary today. And the land feels weary. Dry once more, leaves sag and branches droop. We are lacklustre, pressured by air shifting in vast space, turning in on itself, twisting from west to east, isotopic moments that press our heads and squeeze our veins. The gusts of air rifle through the yew, the wisteria, the grass. A collared dove traps itself in the greenhouse, ignorant of the open door barely centimetres away. I step close and send my best soothing tones to his frightful ears. Up close, I see his pale grey chest heave in fright and my heart matches his rhythm in this intimate space. I fret that he will break his wing, but he rests for a moment, long enough to spread my hands over his smooth back and gather his fear in. I scoop him out of the door and he flies free, careering over the neighbours’ low roof like a flying machine of old. How is it that one day can be so filled with levity, whilst the next spins a tempest around our hearts? I will wait it out, as I always do, for another morning of light and air to come.
6. Sit in the sun. Sit in the shade. My pen casts a solid shadow on the page, next to a softer swaying blur cast by the flower next to me. The heat builds and my skin tingles. A plane passes overhead and a bird crosses its path above me. That smell wafts up again of deep earthy decaying doings. That hum of bees and hoverflies and wasps. Those swaying white flowers, tall as the sky. That grass, flecked and disrupted by clover, the mess of greens like camouflage. A cloud passes above and the world flattens. The humming and birring and whirring of tiny wings intensifies. A blackbird watches a family of sparrows skirt the edge of the lawn. Sun breaches cloud again, hot, insistent. Blackbird hops closer, stopping to watch if I will move. I pause my writing for a moment. The air in front of my face flexes as a fledging robin wheels by. Surprised by her own proximity to me, she lands anyway on the split wood of the bench arm. We exchange glances for one second, two. Time stills, enough to allow this encounter, then she is off, hopping across the lawn to more furtive places.
7. This morning, we sat with rock. High above our valley, we joined the old ones, left to rise above, and remind us that time will take it all in the end. For now, though, we shared space and time with ponies, newly born but sure-footed already, and with swallows, tagging along for the ride of insects. The sky was clear for a few hours as we dipped down to the next village then steadily climbed on our bicycles to Plasterdown. There were softened views of Tavistock and further west to Cornwall. But something was building on the horizon and we took ourselves home. Now, an unsettled wind troubles the trees, each leaf sounding a tiny clamour of applause. The sky darkens and I feel a few light kisses of rain on my leg. This is a day of waiting: for the storm to come, the work to begin, and the love to be held close for another day.
8. Sometimes, a day is white and echoing, full of absences and pauses. My mind, likewise, feels blank, its neurons as lazy as the leaves outside my window this still day. The birds are quiet save for small twitters and chirrups. The air is filled with a cloying heavy earthen smell of dung, far fields perhaps the site of its spreading. On a day like this, I could walk across a moor, or start a venture, or call a friend, or mourn a loss, or prepare a banquet, or sleep all day beneath silent poppy heads, full of seed. Instead, I must work. Midsummer stops for no woman. I can make no distinction between the light and shade that blend together to dull my senses and slow my thoughts. How come I am so touched by this envelope of air, by this light, this time? How come I am held, yet feel nothing but a blank sheet of solitude keeping me close in? Is this what it is like, to live next door to death? To be neighbours to the dying? Shadows reach around me and through me, like cold slices of steel that splinter as they enter my body. I long for the light of summer once more, already aeons away. I long for roses budding, for grasses swaying in gold evening light, and for the shade of a tree that offers cool respite not an antechamber for loss.
9. Already, shadow is lord of this land. Grey sheets of clouds press heavily on the village and the air is damp with anticipation. Our chairs on the porch sit forlorn. Yesterday, I barely stepped outside, needing a shawl to warm shoulders more accustomed to sunshine. The world feels like it is caught in a web of shadow, unable to shake itself free from sticky integuments. It is like the spider that lives beside my bed, motionless, poised for something only it can decipher, forever waiting. What can this time of shadow teach me? To wait quietly, to nestle your toes into damp soil and nudge those flowers into life. To wait patiently, to trail your fingers through grass laden with early seed and tip their gifts back into the land. To wait reverently, to close your eyes against the cooling air and shake those shadows from their cloisters. To wait respectfully, to lean your ears westward to the dying evening light and listen for the thrush to return with his nocturnal song of dreaming. To wait with love, for the light in the eastern sky and the light in your life, to come back and consume you with grace.
10. From shadow, from the lurking corners of no-light, comes life. Rain has reached our place and we are thankful. Thankful for the fluid re-entering the tiny hairs of root, for the pause in the blaze of light, for the secretive folds at the start of the day that promise such rest and comfort. Out of the shadow of mist and cloud pours water. Another rose blooms. New shoots grow. Grass returns to the gaps between flowers. The morning is quiet, with only the sound of a distant bird and the plink of water from gutter to ground. The midsummer days march on like tiny walkers through the gates of paradise, each one perfect and complete, yet spent and never to return. We work and eat and sleep and smile, and wait. Wait for these middle days of balance to shift towards the shadow of the year once more. We rise and think and cook and worry, and wait. Wait for the tilting point of the earth to tumble us all into tomorrow. We bake and write and paint and tidy, and still we wait. Wait for the connecting fingers of hope to find us and smooth all our days. This damp green-to-the-edges morning holds me gently and I am ready. Ready to meet the narrowing of the year and the coming of the night.
Deeply reflective - I like the way you linger within the moments of summer in these thoughtful expressions of what it means to be in the world. I've been sat watching the swifts above the gardens this morning, and listening to a chaffinch singing its little heart out, as though it knows, too, that winter is coming, but for now the summer holds us. Lovely writing, thanks Lynne.
I find summer quite difficult, as it feels like a time closer to everything dying, and winter seems like a close step to life - evocative writing thank you Lynne