Gifts

It’s that time of year again where I find myself delighting in the warm colours of harvest and trying not to dread too much the dank mornings and dark evenings with their general air of sogginess reaching into my very soul. Autumn. For me it is always half associated with going back to school as I was mainly educated in England where the summer holiday ends not in August but later in September after there has already been a perceptible shift in the temperature and weight of the air. Autumn might be the apple harvest and misty mornings, leaves changing colours and bramble picking but for me it is also the smell of a stationery cupboard, steamed up windows, the scratch of pencil, the soft dense expectancy of a library, new shoes, covering text books with bits of old wallpaper, shirts with too-stiff collars, the switching on of electric lights and the start of chilblains. I was reminded of this the other week as we piled into Jean’s Bothy for the Writing For Wellbeing Group and someone made to switch on the lights inside. Only a couple of weeks earlier the photography group spent the session sitting outside but since then there has been that same definite shift from ‘end of summer’ to ‘start of autumn’. We decided we could do without the lights on and somehow, even though it may have been done as a gesture towards not using electricity un-necessarily during these times of economic strife, it felt like a little gift to still be able to sit indoors and not use the lights. The writing group feels a bit like a gift too.

I can’t always make it, and there are times when I really have to push myself to leave the house because my natural instinct is to stay in my cave and fabricate reasons why I can’t leave even though I know that all of them are only illusions and that the reality is, I’ll feel better for going, joining in with others, talking, writing, listening. That last visit, we looked at the poem ‘Blackberry Picking’ by Seamus Heaney, indeed we listened to him reading out his own work with his velvety seductive voice - the aural equivalent of a scarf made with love. I recognised the first stanza, the excitement of finding the berries, the scratches of the thorns that we barely noticed, the stains on my lips and hands as some of the berries never made it into my carton. But where Heaney marked the passage of time and the shift from childish innocence to some kind of adult acknowledgement of death and decay I no longer felt I was taking part in shared experience. Our bramble picking never ended in rot. Those sweet black nuggets would have been swathed in a muslin cloth and dangling over a pan to make bramble jelly quicker than I could have expressed a desire for crumble and custard. No glut was ever let go to waste. That was a crime on a par with being idle. Apples, tomatoes, blackberries, courgettes, runner beans…pickled, pied, preserved in kilner jars, baked, souped and in later years bagged up and frozen. Every meal an expression of the effort, women’s efforts mainly, done to sustain us over the meagre months. Gifts then, but gifts for which I found the duty of gratitude quite onerous as it often is when it’s demanded rather than being left to spring forth freely.

It has now been a week since I drove back from Somerset where various family members gathered along with friends to celebrate my cousin’s life. I’ve always thought she was amazing but to hear my thoughts echoed and repeated from so many others was special. She had taken the time to let me know how much she had appreciated having me in her life in the very small way that I managed, and to have been appreciated by someone who was appreciated by so many others was humbling. Her daughter is very like her, which is wonderful and as she helped me prepare for my journey home I found myself putting flowers from the previous day’s celebrations along with leftover puddings and apples from the orchard into the boot of my car. I took the apples to a local event where children pressed them for their juice amid much laughter and although it was but a fraction of the fruit that would still need to be processed in some way I thought how different this gift was in that it added only to our joy and left no aftertaste of debt.