Salt, and the path to the sea....
I have seen you looking up, burning in your loneliness
Arthur Miller
The Crucible
A moth on my glass door. The wings extended in an attempt to ventilate and cool. The creature perplexed by the glass. Where to go? How to deal with this infernal heat?
Another Moth was caught in the heat of publicity this week, the moth that trod the salt path, treading the ups and downs of the south coast path, beating back the illness that threatened his life, chasing away a nightmare, hoping for a dream..... The heat is on.
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| Hollyhock |
The heat has been getting to me, too. Everything is dry, including me. Heat has never been my summer favourite - winter, OK, yes. A log fire and thick clothing, the glow of burning oak logs and the warmth of wool - these are the stuff of luxury. But the actinic singe of the highest of suns blazing down on an unprotected pale skin is not for me.
Don't misunderstand. I love the sunshine. I love time on a beach, with a loved one, dipping in and out of the refreshing waters, then taking a while in the shade while the waves scrawl across the sands, just a shell or two away. That's fine with me.
But unrelenting ultraviolet baking is too much. When the land is cracked and even the nettles are dying. This is no fun.
It is seen in nature too. The colours have bleached a little and the structure of the plants is more straggly. Here rosebay willow herb reaches up to an ambiguous blue sky:
And here the mischievous ragwort mimics the sun and shines like fool's gold for a week or so, before it recedes into a downy nothingness in the fields, the cinnabar moths having taken flight:
As the creeping thistles have already begun to spread their whispy seeds:
The sun is boiling high, while a few clouds tease out shadows but offer no respite.
The river Ingol is but a trickle:
These are the dog days, associated since ancient times with the period in which the Dog Star, Sirius, a star twice the size of our sun and twenty-five times more luminous, can be seen in the morning sky.
And in these hot, dry days, the freshness of spring has evaporated, and we are left with the tough, straggling plants that do their darndest to attract flying insects to their blooms, like viper's bugloss:
And this is, (I think) common cat's ear, (though it could be rough hawkbit?)
The ox-eye daisies are exhausted,
As are the poppies, pale and frayed, their petals bruised by the wind:
Crane's-bill, or wild geranium, tangles with the withered grasses,
While the brambles struggle to remain in flower long enough to attract the bees:
The trees, also, despite their deeper root systems, are working hard to ensure their survival. The black alder coned seed pods are already browning and desiccated:
An ash tree has vast bunches of keys, perhaps desperate that at least some may grow, and grow without die-back:
And in the woods, the floor is strewn with sweet chestnut catkins, too early, methinks. Will there be fruit this year? Perhaps, because 2024 was a mast year, when the trees produced far more fruit than the pigs, squirrels and jays etc could consume, they were already going to conserve their energies this year? Anyway, I think the drought has taken its toll:
Anyway, it's hot - too hot - and I don't need Martha Reeves and the Vandellas to tell me about a Heatwave..... Suffice it to say it's cooler by the sea, so I take my own pinch-of-salt path [It's all true! Ed] past the parched grasslands and unusually short crops:
Down to the sea, the cool grey sea, shining like burnished pewter in the evening sun:
Or the posterised sea:
Or the solarised sea:
Nothing, perhaps, is quite how it seems, or how we want it to be, but there's nothing quite like bathing in cool salty waves when the sun is hot. My salt path is between me and the sea, and that's how it will remain.
But in the still cool of the night, I may share it with my moth - if he's still there....
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines
Shakespeare
Sonnet 18
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| Shadow on a beech |
