Leave the things you love the most
How home can come to own you
The beginning of September, 2023
It’s too warm for a wooly hat, and my scalp sweats a little as I walk. Humphrey and I trundle around our regular route at Hunthill near Jedburgh, he probing the undergrowth for something repulsive, I searching for signs of September. It is only the 1st, but I am determined for autumn to start. In two days, I’ll be heading back in time across the Atlantic (where my husband Jim works as the artistic director for the Spokane Symphony) where it is still summer. I have packed shorts and dresses when actually I am quite ready for jumpers and thick socks, though I will admit that today’s hat is uncomfortably premature. I know that by the time we come back, autumn could be in full swing and I’m feeling FOMO at the prospect.
Marking seasonal change has almost become an obsession. There is a privileged intimacy in being able to observe gradual changes in the world, and two weeks away almost feels as if I am being negligent in this relationship. A cruel echo of back-to-school nerves finds me, convincing me that if I miss a beat, I’ll be out of sync for the rest of the year.
I have a lot to do at home to prepare for the trip, but I slow my steps and try to be calmed by my surroundings. Irritating strands of spiders’ silk test me by tickling my face all along the path flanked by high browning bracken. I haven’t spent more than 2 consecutive days in a city all year and I breathe the rich woodland air deep into my lungs, as if I can hold it there in reserve. A freak clump of canary yellow in the canopy of the birch woods catches my eye and makes me smile; my first autumn leaves. But the woodland floor holds cooler tones; the ethereal lilac of scabious and heather, the palest blue shards of a shattered pheasant’s egg. Mildew on young oak leaves has the white-blue quality of frost and I stop to look, spying oak apples forming on the branches. These hard, perfect spheres always seem as if they could not be produced by nature. In this case, the oak is coerced to produce a protective structure around the larvae of an insect, whose enzymes instruct the deformation. Alongside elaborately slimy fungi, the woodland floor holds enough inspiration for multiple sci-fi films.
A scream in the canopy causes me to look up, but all I can see is a kerfuffle in the leaves. A few steps on, Humphrey tentatively sniffs the site of what appears to have been a Controlled Bird Explosion; undoubtedly the handiwork of the raptors we just heard.
At the end of our walk I pick a single wood sorrel and pop it into my mouth even though I know it is likely to be fibrous and dull at this time of year. It is, but I feel a strong desire to incorporate summer’s last green. At home, I’m doing something similar; eating an ill-advised volume of vegetables on a daily basis out of a duty to ‘make the most’ of the garden before we leave. It is not a safe task for one individual and so I WhatsApp various friends inviting them to pick their own. There are no takers, because of course everyone else’s garden is producing, too.
This year, I’ve left the garden at all its critical moments and feel almost like I have let it down. On the eve of our departure, it is dripping with accusatory beans and courgettes. I reassure myself that I have frozen and eaten all I can, and finally sit to watch the swallows and house martins dive and swirl above the house. They may be gone when we return which I know will leave the house and garden feeling strangely still.
At 5.30am on the morning of our departure I am in the garden, the hem of my dressing gown soaked in dew, harvesting marrows. I tuck them up onto the highest shelf of the larder and hope that they’ll survive the two weeks while I’m away. It is disconcerting to note a buried belief that the garden, even the house, will somehow perish without my constant interference. That’s a lot of pressure for an individual.
On the plane, after several medicinal libations, mum sagely reminds us both that traveling from home and garden is an opportunity and a privilege. It is also particularly important, she says, to regularly leave the very things you love the most (and here, she means our respective gardens), because otherwise they can come to own you.
Too true.