Back at my attic window desk with typewriter and notebook, editing and re-editing this years journal entries. Splicing in passages from previous fltmtn incarnations. (2021—2023). Cutting the results short, shorter.
Annihilating darlings, idols.
The writing always imprecise, always inelegant.
Always missing the mark.
Moving an apple tree dead long before we arrived on the mountain. Trunk crumbling to earthy loam as it’s dragged across the garden, making way for new growing beds, a prosperous weave of ornamentals. Honeyberry, hops, miscanthus. Mushrooms sprouting from the mouldering stump.
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A final clearing of the Autumn meadow, sickle and push mower. Removing the surplus grasses grown up since the hay cut. Raking over. Continuing to scrape back the skein of mosses colonising the topsoil. Choking the seed-bank in its years of abandonment. Half-cast in shadow from the lowering sun. Even the noisy singers quieting down.
Daily routine — 7am pot of coffee, reading over yesterday's notes, searching for another inspired synonym for mud — mostly spent staring past the typewriter and out through the six small panes of distorting glass. Focus shifting between the dewy apples turning red, the rosehip orbs sceptered atop wild bushes, the gauzey haze of rowan berries. Red red red lit by white reflector sky.
A boat trip into the grey archipelago. Pine and juniper clawing smoothly cragged spurs of granite. Dark bedrock isles parting the Baltic. Walking around the islands watching the tall reeds, grasses billowing. A naval fort lined with cannons set to seed with wildflower. Damp subterranean sleeping quarters. More faint smell of sea-weed rising from brackish water.
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Recently harvested garlic and onions hanging in bunches and braids. Hanging from porch beams, hanging from shelves and stairwells, hanging from old hooks and bent nails.
Unwavering assault of falling apples, clanging off roof tiles, rolling into gutters. Rolling down gutters and splashing into opened rain butts. Fermenting into dank, rank cider.
Apples and pears and plums piling up garden paths, piling along fence-lines and out across the forest edges. The cottage garden boundary a mix of cultivated orchard species and self-seeded escapees. Wild boughs laden with fruit, reaching for the fading shimmer of an Autumn sun.
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A bench in the meadow. Scrap wood sanded and hammered into two old stumps.
The usual observations (oft repeated).
Fragrant berry clusters. Sloe and juniper budding dark blue around the base of the cherry groves. Sweet scent of rotting and ripening apple. Swarm of small black insects drawn to the sap leaking from a recently fallen pine bough. The fray attracting giant blue-bodied dragonflies that sweep inaudibly about, hunting and feeding in flight.
This years unused fire pit stacked with off-cuts and branches and overgrowing.
A beetle I've never seen before dropping out of the sky. Landing on my knee. Its wings retracting into emerald green carapace.
Another day spent weeding, cutting back, uprooting. Rowdy treelets seeding all around. Dig out one plum tree sapling and a dozen more resilient suckers shoot up in its place. The mountain's formerly abandoned state struggling to re-assert itself. The spruce forest pressing in at the edges. Each year the unruliest tangle suppressed a little more. A thousand slow but steady acts of progress.
In the dewy half-light waiting for the sun to rise. Looking all around for inspiration. Telling myself there's only so many times I can describe the mud that follows thunder-heads. The spongey leaf-soil oozing gog.
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A week of full Summer sun brings the mountain to life. Snakes and lizards basking on bedrock and firewood piles, leaving crumpled slips of skin set jewelled in sawdust. Myriad species of hunting and solitary wasp flitting between exposed timber beams, investigating stretches of open soil shared by ground dwelling bees, digging burrows, nesting in holes bored by over-Wintering beetles. Colourful hawker dragonflies streaking between kitchen garden beds laden with fruit. Great green bush crickets devouring climbing bean flowers.
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