Swamped!

This time of year I can feel a bit like my duck who is being slowly engulfed by an ants’ nest . They found a dry spot under her metal belly and have multiplied until her eyes will soon be filled with earth and perfect ant eggs.

No, I haven’t finally lost it!

There is just such a wonderful profusion of fruit to pick and there is no time to do it. The sun is either so roastingly hot that picking boils the brains, or the heavens have opened and I am in danger of a biblical thunder bolt and electrocution over the raspberries.

It is a pleasant problem to have, but I hate waste and all those red currents, black currants, gooseberries, cherries and raspberries won’t pick themselves, so I put down the ipad and rush back out to the garden.

I might even find time to rescue the duck!

 

 

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Stoning Cherries.

 Stoning cherries.

10 years ago we planted a cherry tree

Thin stick on an unpromising slope

For the blossom, for the fruit, if it ever came.

Each year the stick thickened

The trunk glossy and banded with fine bracelets of silver,

Yielding just a few small cherries.

This year it is finally heavy with fruit

Little globes, still sour , that explode in the mouth.

I stand by the sink, watch the flies on the pane

And push the stones out of each fruit.

The juice runs through my fingers,

The punctured flesh sticks under my  thumb nail.

My hands are clumsy,

but they slowly find the stone

in every fruit,

The stones are discarded in the sticky sink and,

Left behind  is a heaped bowl of broken cherry flesh,

jewel red and succulent.

Worth the wait.

Cathy Cooper 2020

On Monday they open the borders.

The virus has done so many things, most of them bad.

Closing international borders has been one of the oddest results of a virus that can be sneezed across a transatlantic airplane or between lovers walking in a forest.

I cross between France and Switzerland six times a day to get to work and back. At the weekend I often cross into Germany and back a few times to buy cat food and to get a kebab at my favourite Turkish kebab shop.  This has all stopped.

Even the crossings in the forests used by cyclists and hikers and runners every day have been boarded/ bordered up!

Due to the unfathomable decision of the UK to leave the EU, I reclaimed my Irish heritage, so I could continue to be European. The open borders within  Europe seemed to me a slice of sanity, sophistication and friendliness in an increasingly fractured world.

Then the borders were closed.

It felt like a real war, not against the virus, but against each other. If ever there was a time for the EU to work together, this surely was it. All of the countries working together on health policies, quarantine advise, common lockdown could have been so powerful, but instead each country went their own way.

I dont know which country got it right and which got it wrong, but I do know that closed borders have increased unease and even fear for so many people who were  used to living in this open area that used to seem like it was my extended home.

On Monday they open the borders between France and Switzerland and Germany for everyone. I took some photos of the little closed borders between neighbouring villages and even between neighbouring trees.

I hope I never see them closed again.

Before the rain.

Before the rain the peonies  were perfect.

Before the deluge the roses were pristine,

The lawn was trim and the slugs asleep,

But after the storm, in the snail slimed, dripping quiet,

The perfume was divine.

 

 

 

Better than plastic!

On the dry woodland path, a plastic children’s toy.  Matt green with a single band of yellow to say snake and then it moved.

As if pulled by an invisible thread it was moving over the soil and stones.

It was tiny, but every minute vertebrae articulated like mercury flowing across the earth. I wondered if I should pick it up to save it from the metal hooves of the passing horses, but it didn’t need me.

This acrobat’s ribbon of improbable life zig zagged, wiggled and shivered into the grass .

It was safe and I wasn’t even sure if I had seen something so light and so alive on the dry path in the woods.