Fruit Trees

The fruit trees are bearing a lot of fruit this year. The plum, the apricot, apple and pear. It’s going to be a bumper crop, especially from the plum tree. We shall have to get the ladder.

It’s the sort of thing that you read in books, the part where the couple, are most happiest, the long, hot summers of youth. I’m not here as a couple, nor do I have my youth, but it is hot. The summer won’t last much longer; they pass by with such rapidity these days, as do every season and every year.

And I don’t have a ladder, just a thin metal step ladder that won’t be high enough for the highest plums or apricots. The cherry tree gave up its fruit to the birds some time ago, as always. I’ve considered netting, but it’s such a large cherry tree that birds may get trapped and I wouldn’t want that, all for a bite of a cherry.

The spider has taken my fly again. I wonder if it (he/she/they?) are grateful? I hope so, and perhaps knows it’s me who provides the flies, living in the electricity panel above the front door. I hope it’s happy there. I’ve worked out a technique in the garden with a take-away container - I spot a fly and then cover it slowly with the container. It invariably flies into it and I slide the lid under it to capture the poor thing. And I rattle the box about to stun it, then grab another container. I put the other container under the web, and drop the fly into the web. Sometimes I miss and it drops into the other container. The spider (“Spid,” I call her/him/them) emerges from the hole in the electricity panel eventually, but not immediately, and drags the fly inside. Probably not best for evolution or even for Spid, to be fed flies every now and then from a human benefactor.

This is what I do these days, where work is a bit thin, but somehow I’m managing month to month, still in this old house and still with my relatively new car. It’s wonderful and equally frightening being freelance. But I get to wander around my big garden. The house came with it, same as other houses here, just with a much larger garden than anyone else. I was terrified of the hugeness of it all - the house itself is a moderate size, standard three bed ex-council house. The garden seemed to need 24-hour tending to, and the lawn is a bugger to mow, it took me an hour and a half with a new lawnmower when I first moved in. Now I have a gardener who cuts it every two weeks, at a surprisingly low price, in about fifteen minutes. It’s overgrown elsewhere with all kinds of things, but I’ve come to be at peace with it, and I’m not going to have my sharp borders and paths and waterfalls and ponds and exotic plants like I imagined. Maybe one day, if I get that lucrative contract.

So this is life at the moment. It’s idyllic in lots of ways, but I worry, and I’ve no provision for the future, apart from the house and the ever-decreasing value of the car. I worry about next month’s money, and I worry about what to do with all that fruit. I am trying to see things as they are, though, and happy to potter in the garden, even though it screams at me to “do some gardening”. Today, though, it’s too hot to sit out there or pull at some weeds, so I‘m in my study typing this.