Photo: September in my little garden - still quite green but a few leaves (and a few feathers) are blowing in on windy days…
SEPTEMBER
It’s here again, the morning sun
that lingers as a pink curtain on a faraway window.
An owl in early daylight; no sweet others.
Signs of foxes in a dried-up garden;
half-hearted holes and knocked over flowers.
Walking both into and away from the sun,
I split shadows, take one breath
not knowing which of me
is keeping up. I make one plan: to not mind,
to not wish away the rest of the year with lists.
I fill my pockets with acorns
and watch the bees slowing, darkening,
not yet gone.
(Cathy Cullis 2022)
**
What do you do when make for yourself? Just for you.
My ‘free time’ is filled up with the usual mundane tasks we nearly all have to get on with. Then there’s reading, which is an essential requirement for me. I re-read a great deal. But my hands like to stay busy, so there are times when I just want to make-make-make and ideas race ahead and I would need the proverbial month of Sundays to get anything done.
The year I have discovered a deeper love for stitching by hand. I particularly enjoy small-scale patchwork, really making the most of scraps or making scraps to make patchwork! Cross stitch is also something, you may have seen, that I enjoy - though I find little pleasure in following charts. My ‘free time’ is limited, so as much as I would like to do everything, I have to be selective, which means I start a project and if it is anything large it takes me months and months - maybe even years - to complete. So I tend to stick to small things.
And I like small things. Which is good.
photo: hand stitch patchwork - I make use of scraps of hand dyed fabrics - and sometimes flip printed fabrics for a more muted look
But to play about with scraps of fabric is not a frivolous thing, I must remind myself. I am keeping my skills going and finding new ones - I am discovering what works for me and how I might like to combine interests.
photo: combining a cross stitched alphabet (that took me ages to stitch! That grey fabric was not easy to stitch on!) with patchwork scraps…. I will continue on with this and make into a framed piece to go on my ‘alphabet wall’ - and I’ll show you that some time soon…..
**
A few small stories from this week
My son, daughter and I go for a walk through the woods and into the park. It’s a sunny afternoon and the trees are lit up for us to see so many green acorns. It’s going to be another mast year. My daughter talks about her keen interest in science and how trees communicate chemically and through fungal networks. We find ourselves then discussing robotic plants given bionic limbs so that they may shift more easily toward light sources. By the time we walk to a local shop to buy drinks we three are all quite dizzy with ideas of future life on earth and walk back to the park with refreshments, to sit quietly and enjoy the still very green view…. There’s a sudden rumble of thunder. I alter my view and see dark clouds and a flash of lightning - count one-potato-three-potato-four…. The storm is some way away but we decide to head home. The woods are darker, the paths littered with green acorns….
**
A neighbour has an electric car - well several do now. But there is one that glides past and sounds so very like a ghost. Before I see it through my living room window, I can hear its ethereal approach - I stop whatever I do and have to say: the ghost car. Unless I am careful, break the habit now, I will forever be whispering: ghost car, ghost car…. For, I presume, the future will be filled with this sound?
**
I’m stood at the bus stop in town, waiting for a no.4 to get home. It’s a silly place for a bus stop - on a narrow pavement just outside Georgian buildings (a pub and a sports shop). There’s always a bustle, the queue for various buses mingling with people trying to get by. You can’t help but overhear things. I listen to two young women in their early twenties. One tells the other she has never been on a double-decker bus. Have you not, really? Her friend says. Her friend says she might just get on one for the sake of getting on it, one day.
photo: sketchbook from 2018
**
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A welcome respite with acorns, forest walks, small patchworks, and changing seasons. We had a wild storm Friday night, thrashing trees and lightning and stinging rain and then... our power went out! It was pitch dark for six hours, and I thought about how nature speaks to us in ways that make our petty annoyances dissipate in order to focus on things more urgent. When we get heavy snowfalls and morning dawns on a hushed landscape it’s inevitable that neighbors, who ordinarily rush past without much acknowledgement, will initiate conversation whilst leaning on snow shovels, taking a break from the exertion. People share, offer help, communicate, a naturally imposed cease-fire in the fight against time. I find it a beautiful thing once in a while. I somehow came across a book called Four Thousand Weeks. Rather than a time management handbook the message is to use our time well doing the things we love. I’m ready for a shift in perspective that encourages me to make wiser choices. I hope you have a wonderful week. 💚
and always i offer a gentle American hug, which the three of you shyly and politely accept. Til next time, then, sweet friend xx