Winter Remains

I sit at the top of the garden on hard, wet concrete, with fallen rotten leaves at my feet. It’s a grey, wet day again. My tea steams. My breath steams. I breathe in clean decay.

The skeletal remains of my beautiful summer garden stand defeated around me. I run my fingers along hollowed-out stems, empty seed heads, flowers dead and rotting. Little souls, lost to the season.

I know the summer will come again, but that summer never will.

There is a small space I can tuck myself into, behind the post, where no one can see me and I can see no one. For a moment I slip outside the fold of the wintry present.

I close my eyes and look again at my little patch of garden, and then, slowly, I begin to wind back time.

The first thing to go is the sound of the traffic. (The relief).

The sheds disappear.

The ponds are gone.

The structure I am leaning against melts back into grass.

The houses begin to be unmade. Brick by brick. Concrete pavements and paths are rolled up. Streetlights blink off and disappear one by one.

Time rolls back until all around me are farmers’ fields. A natural quiet and clean, bright air. I can see the familiar curve of the land my garden sits upon, the gentle sweep of the hill, rolling all the way down to the old brickyard.

I follow it to the River Tame, its path across this small slice of land still recognisable, but wilder, wider, more alive. I follow an old hedgerow back up the hill to my piece of land. It is unremarkable, just a corner of a farmer’s field. Grass. An old hawthorn. And yet it is so beautiful to see the shape of the land around it.

I can feel the land breathing, freed from concrete, from heaviness. I sit in a winter long past, a vintage hush. The wind moves through long-gone trees. I place my hands on the ground. Stretch out. Everything stretches outwards. This modern world it packs us in too tightly.

I keep my hands on the ground, long enough for it to remember me. Long enough for the love to remain.