To everything there is a.....

Season of Misses....

Walking by the Wash, I can almost feel the tug of that harsh mistress (Artemis, or Selene, sometimes known by other names) the moon, as she slips toward the west in the early light.  Even though she was at her fullest last Tuesday, in combination with the sun she still has the power to flood the world until it is out of its depth:

The moon's a harsh mistress

She's hard to call your own

Jimmy Webb

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

(As sung by Joe Cocker)

This exceptionally high tide has driven flocks of waders to feed on the few remaining slips of beach, and feisty sanderling skip and splash as the waves splutter and suck.

Dunlin skim the wave tops in tight formation,

 

while turnstones, 

 

curlew and oystercatchers strut up and down at the water’s edge, less keen to get their feet wet.

A kestrel skims low across the waterless marsh, a dark shrew clamped in its talons.

Then a family of swans beat past, their necks stretched toward the shore,

and I remember Yeats at Coole:

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

W B Yeats

Wild Swans at Coole

On the lagoon thousands of knot are resting until the tide ebbs again, having performed their synchronised whirling for the morning crowd.  

I walk past a field where over a hundred curlew seem also to be taking a breather. I wonder what they are thinking? Which turns my thoughts around..... It seems only the other day that we swam off, and walked along, these beaches; where did the summer go?

And now there is no one - just empty shells; not even a footprint to show the tracks of time....

 

Then, across the grassy marsh the last camomile and ragwort still attract bumblebees and add some welcome colour,

but the cracked earth yearns for some consistent rain. Young greylag geese burst from the reeds alongside a still-wet drain as I approach, upset at my intrusion.

In the woods the Ken Hill Tamworths are rooting and snuffling, and the path is prickly here and crunchy there according to the mix of trees – now shedding their fruits:

sweet chestnuts, beech mast and acorns in vast quantities this year as the drought has triggered survival procedures.

 

The bracken is fading, although, having dropped redundant leaves earlier, most trees are still green, despite being torn by the wind.

It is a strangely slow autumn, though the poplars and the birch are beginning to turn, catching the low streaming light:

 

I stuff my pockets with crab apples from the hedgerow, to make delicate jelly:

and taste the few remaining blackberries,

though I leave the sloes,

and the rose hips for others with more patience. On the way home, avoiding fungi I don't recognise:

I pick a couple of parasol mushrooms: 

for an omelette lunch, and collect some of the larger chestnuts to boil with fennel seeds for afters. The season has its plenty and we are lucky that nature provides; it certainly is, as Keats would have it, a

Season of misses, and fellow moodfulness

However you see it:

Only lovers

see the fall

a signal end to endings

a gruffish gesture alerting

those who will not be alarmed

that we begin to stop

in order to begin

again.

Maya Angelou

Late October

And so I walk on upon this glorious autumn day, stealing images that hold the time, though time inevitably trickles on. As soon as the shutter clicks, the moment is gone, and the world turns, the moon falls, the dew evaporates and the day draws to night. It is what it is, and that is all there is to be said just now.....

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf,

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day

Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Questo è dedicato.....