Greedy for the light they press soft leaves to the cool glass
The stems yearn over one another
Etiolated by desire.
The storm splatters rain hard against the window
The roof lifts a little in the wind
Groaning to resettle it’s self on the February house.
The empty quater of view is suddenly red kite –
Angled tail and feathers quartering the lift and bluster of the day.
Inside, the leaves press harder.
The shed came with the house.
It also came with a ship’s bell and a wendyhouse low roof that has cracked my husband’s skull so many times he had to wear a hard hat to enter the place safely. Mice live under the floorboards, slow worms live in the compost heap leaning against it and Madam Charlotte’s feral kittens slink in out of the rain sometimes.
It leaks, it creaks and it is falling down. Garden tools only stay dry on the left hand side and only my flower stakes are slowly rotting away in a corner bucket that has funnelled all of the rain into its sodden depths. A tarpaulin seemed like a good idea in the summer, but by the end of the winter, it has been lashed by storms and shredded by the thorns of the dog rose.
It has had it.
Spring is coming fast and there is no more that can be done to patch it up . The shanty shed is all out of metaphors and must be pulled down and replaced.
When, that is, I can be bothered!
February can seem a low point for life. The signs of early spring are cribbed with fears of snow and frost to come, so the sun on our back seems fearfully precipitous.
Luckily, other things are not so fearful and flourish in the most unlikely places.
The photo was taken of recent wire fence, ugly in its utility, fencing in a slab of shorn and tidied land. However the lichen and the moss were not disdainful of the plastic coated wire . They sensed opportunity, a habitat in which to grow and each intersection was frilled with light green life, finding a safe and unlikely foothold.
February is full of modest, opportunistic life!
Cathy's real country garden 
You must be logged in to post a comment.