Of august lineage
Even on the wastelands there is beauty to be found. The bindweed weaves its way up through a chain link fence, its tightly clasped flowers ready to unfurl into great white trumpets. Up above, a nodding bramble bears blackberries of green, red and black.
Down on Mr Grigg’s plot, there is fruit to be had. Blackcurrants in abundance, their smell on being picked taking me back to the 1970s when I earned 35p a bucket during the summer holidays. Crushed purple blackness on dextrous fingers.
The gooseberry bush with fruits we have missed – skeletal branches with fat and spiky globes hanging like pendants – and the odd raspberry, just one each, as a mouthwatering precursor to the harvest ahead.
August, the month of the long school holidays, daily plant watering, haymaking and my birthday. Perfect.
That's about it.
Love Maddie x
Down on Mr Grigg’s plot, there is fruit to be had. Blackcurrants in abundance, their smell on being picked taking me back to the 1970s when I earned 35p a bucket during the summer holidays. Crushed purple blackness on dextrous fingers.
The gooseberry bush with fruits we have missed – skeletal branches with fat and spiky globes hanging like pendants – and the odd raspberry, just one each, as a mouthwatering precursor to the harvest ahead.
August, the month of the long school holidays, daily plant watering, haymaking and my birthday. Perfect.
That's about it.
Love Maddie x
A splendidly Keatsian first paragraph, if I may say so, Maddie! We'll have you spouting odes in the flick of a lamb's tail!
ReplyDeleteWonderful. I had a Laurie Lee kind of moment as I read this.
ReplyDeleteLove it when you wax lyrical, I was transported off into the warm summer days of my childhood, a rude wasp buzzed around my keyboard and I was back in the real world, get off, Oi! get off............sorry :)x
ReplyDeleteOh, the smells! I mean, good ones, of course. Took me right to being three years old and trundling through an Okanagan valley in BC.
ReplyDeleteAugust, good.
There, another perfect-English-countryside sort of post. I'll be right over to pick berries - it sounds so much more a beautiful experience over your way than over here, where it's all brambles and bugs.
ReplyDeleteLovely! Absolutely lovely Maddie. Thanks for sharing the beauty of your world.
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ReplyDeleteNice post...but I loathe August. It usually rains, ruining UK holidays (it's raining today), everyone is on holiday so nothing gets done at work; you start feeling the autumnal nip which signals summer is on the way out, and Christmas starts arriving in the shops. Ugh.
ReplyDeleteYour post jogged my memory, as a young teenager my cousin and I picked berries for 25cents a bucket for a ruthless boss (he was an older teenager) we nicknamed Hitler! LOL
ReplyDeleteNow August is too Dog Days for me, but your words brought back my childhood when my Mom sent us back of the summer place to pick blueberries for putting up for the winter jams...Thanks, very nice..
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting. Our bindweed flowers are nearly over. Very few out at present where the hedges were white a couple of weeks ago.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a child we lived in a pea-growing area and would collect the peas which fell onto the road from trailers and eat them from their pods. I was always surprised and disappointed that they were big and old even though freshly picked. Can't think what company would have bought them for freezing or canning. The empty pea-vines were then taken to cows to eat and the fields stank where they lay in piles.
Esther
Gosh you do paint amazing word pictures, I almost feel like I'm actually there smelling the blackcurrants!
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