Sliding on by.

This grape vine tendril has grown right across my front door step. This is vegetable testimony to how few people have stepped across the threshold and how rarely I have been out this way.

When the vine started budding it was early spring and we sat drinking tea in the sunshine, enjoying the lockdown and the luxury of working from home and watching the garden come to life for once. The bat came back to roost in the eves as summer started and the grapes began to set.

Now it is autumn : Being home is still a pleasure and the garden is still amazing but venturing beyond the garden still seems foolish . Covid has not gone away and so the grapes have fattened unadmired by guests and visitors.

I wish there was a reason to trim the wayward frond , I wish the vine shoot was in anybody’s way: but it isnt, so it curls indolently over the door mat.

I wonder if the door will be completely overgrown by the time a vaccine liberates us all back into normal life, or if I will have simply learnt to make my own wine and there will be no reason to ever go out again!

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Praying Mantis

I was peering at the bus stop display when something flew by and landed on the glass.

It was a large green praying mantis. I know them from Greece and Southern Europe but had never seen one in urban Switzerland.

Global warming perhaps?

I looked up mantis in Basel to send in the record in case anyone was interested, but instead of a wildlife recording site, I found papers from Basel University on how praying mantises have been observed eating humming birds and sucking their brains out!

To say I was surprised was an understatement . Apparently bird eating mantis are not the mantis religiosa of my bus stop encounter, but another species of mantis that has been introduced as pest control and are now actually eating North American hummingbirds.

You couldn’t make this stuff up!

Second spring.

In the autumn the swing of light is the same as in the spring,

and in the forest dog violets bloom again.

In my garden the Mock Orange puts out a few perfumed flowers and the rain has coaxed another push of sunshine yellow mulleins from the almost ossified Summer stem.

The Earth is turning, light is fading from this season,

but it can feel the same as the light growing in the spring,

If you want it to,

If you try hard enough

But there are swallows massing on the wires

Socially distancing swallows, but swallows none the less,

And all my wishing will not keep them a moment longer

Stretching out their improbable Pterodactyl wings to preen the summer dust away

Before swinging back on the turning world that never stops,

However much we want it to.