Memory lapse
Well, the very first thing is an apology! If you read this regularly, you might have noticed that since February I’ve posted the very same poem, one about puffins, three times here. It’s not as if I’ve been losing track due to swimming in excess posts either… Anybody’d think that I like that poem.
Should you be interested, I’ve left it in the post that actually had ‘puffins’ in the title, and will in a minute have replaced it in the other two posts with different poems from my Iona collection.
June rain
May has been her usual spectacular self, but hotter than usual. The flocks of moon daisies whitening all the fields here are many weeks early, and now, after gusts and downpours (what a relief! The water butts are filling nicely), they’re prostrated. The barley is still greengold; the wheat still bluegreen but tinged blond; the first hay and first silage have been made.
Today, after the intense heat of the last several weeks, I found myself grinning as we went into Huelgoat – it’s eleven years now of my walking in the town and the Forest in the inevitable early June rain, with swallows flitting around our feet and dodging the cars, sliding up and over the bonnet and windscreen at the very last moment. I have a particular fondness for the forest in this kind of drizzly showery rain which intensifies the green, and ameliorates temperatures in the 30s.
First things
Someone has been appreciating the early morning May sun outdoors, briefly, first thing near where we sit drinking tea, though even in this old thick-walled stone house it’s been hard to keep him cool after about 10am, by which time he will have had a walk and slunk back inside. He too appreciates the cooler days more.
A couple of days ago I saw the first three swallow fledglings, tailless but wellgrown, sitting on a wire. The numbers of swallows are well down year on year, so this was a delight. A pair are nesting in my neighbours’ little tin-roofed woodshed, so we’re not sure why they spurn our several big barns, one of which even has plank nest-supports…
The blackcap’s back singing all day, and often the chiffchaff. I’ve been watching for the extended family of long-tailed tits, flitting with their young from oak to oak. We leave much of our meadows un-mown, but I cut small grassed areas back and front of the house, and much of the time they’re populated with at least two song thrushes and several blackbirds (when the latter are not stealing the strawberries from my open circular herb and bee bed).
First young frog, in said circular bed. Our small population of the huge Quimper snail is on the move in the wet. (They’re big enough as to be almost cute.)
We entered the ‘hungry gap’ in May, when there was nothing left to harvest, bar herbs, in the garden. However our stored dried and frozen beans, our butternut squashes, our onions, frozen sweetcorn, peaches and stewed apple, and walnuts, and rather a lot of chutneys, have held out. But – first small harvest of the new season – yesterday I picked the first rainbow chard and beet leaves for a Thai green curry with our fat white Cocos beans; any day now we will have courgettes, and the first tomatoes are ripening, as are the green walnuts and the little peaches. We’ve eaten half a dozen strawberries, too.
There are visitors on the broad beans, which are also just starting to produce (after a great deal of sowing and resowing - thanks, Breton voles). I was alarmed until I found out that they are ladybird larvae – really good news for us, if not for the blackfly on which they are feasting.
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I love these cuspal moments when everything is on the verge of bursting into fullness. I was thinking this morning of other Junes (following that thread of walking in the Forest in the June rain), and how so often early June is an inspiring and happy time for me. I remembered a tiny poem in my first poetry collection Looking For Icarus: Tamar
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Hill’s velvet pelt of faraway barley;
at the cusp of the tide the trees’ green
smoke. Beyond, the manor house, hidden, secret.
Remember the lily pond, the tunnelling shrubs,
our sudden emergence into that
exuberance of light?
Roselle Angwin
We’re coming up now for another cusp, when the Hawthorn tree in the old Celtic alphabet hands over to the midsummer Oak, and we race towards the summer solstice. I’m not sure how this can be, since the winter solstice and Yule celebrations seem a week or two ago. (I also can’t believe that it’s five years since A Spell in the Forest was published – also a June beginning.)
Elderflowers
Another lovely thing about May (this year; normally June) is picking the elderflowers to make cordial (ask if you want the recipe; it is in my forthcoming book, along with one for elderflower sorbet).
After straining it, I freeze the lemon zest and pieces, cut up; they make wonderful additions to ice cubes in the cordial or in gin and tonic. We drink the cordial with sparkling (filtered) water made with a soda siphon so as not to waste plastic, garnished with fresh mint. Till next time, my friends…
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