Winter grounding

02 Dec Winter grounding

Winter is draping itself over the allotments like a cape around the shoulders of an old friend.  A watery sun managed to squeeze through the late morning mist the other day as I harvested some of the chard that still thrives and picked the last few dwarf beans curled up on their stalks like dark little worms. Unappetising in their natural form – astonishing and gratifying that they turn green when you cook them. More spent leaves to clear all brown and damp. Pungent straw and manure to add to the compost. 

It’s been a couple of weeks since I was down here. Busy with other things and the weather’s often been unrelentingly wet.  I realise how much I miss the sanctuary of this space with its blend of order and disorder and its capacity to mark time. Even this late in the year when so much has died back and the colours are muted, the crops swaddled under winter fleece and cleared soil hunkered down beneath recycled compost bags or bits of cardboard to counter the weeds, the place is a haven. Its exuberant spring and summer beauty is blunted but there is still a sense of space and peace here, a kind of rootedness. 

I find that rootedness more and more important. An escape from a troubled world. Weekly walks with a friend across the two local parks help too. The seasons may be shifting, unseasonable warmth lingering into November, but you can still sense their progress and feel reassured. 

A couple of weeks ago on a rare sharply fresh morning, an intimation of frost in the air and early mist at ground level, we walked our usual route. The mist was like an inversion of what is natural. Usually it is the tops of the trees that disappear but that day the mist lay so low that their trunks were obscured and their canopies seemed to hang by invisible threads suspended from a perfectly blue sky. 

Gulls perched along the fence by the side of the car park were so evenly spaced it seemed as if they’d been placed there by some mildly obsessive hand. Installation avian art. They gather like this, watchful as the humans assemble, knowing a food source is nigh. They will take on bigger birds, like the Egyptian geese that loiter by the stream at the back of the car park showing off their luscious plumage of autumn tones. The gulls battle for any scrap, eyeing up something to swipe as soon as it’s dropped or even seize out of your hand while you’re looking the other way. An expansive diet and no qualms about sharing plates, they are perpetually on the lookout for the next meal. 

As we walked and talked the mist dispersed, lingering here and there over ponds by the side of the path. By the time we perched on our favourite tree stump and took out our flasks of coffee, it had evaporated altogether leaving the low sun to backlight the reeds at the edge of Oak Pond and warm our faces. It cheers us and grounds us, this weekly ritual when we embrace the world at walking pace, greet the runners and dog-walkers, roam over the stuff of life, breathe in the smells of earth, grass, tree, moss, take stock of where we are in the season and in our lives.