Small Ideas
25th July In the cooler late evening, the air in this small farming village smells of cow-pats and dry grass. The skyline is silhouetted with the outlines of cottages and houses – steeply-pitched roofs and chimney pots. No lights, and mute at ten in the evening. Not a sound disturbs me, except the very faint drone of a very distant plane. The clouds form an alternative landscape of deep grey cirrus and cumulus over a fading blue sky. Peach horizon – sunset. For a time, no cars pass our cottage, outside which I sit at a round glass table under a folded sun umbrella, the white screen of my laptop illuminating my personal dusk. It’s the kind of evening, which, having broken the pressured feeling of day-long heat with a deliciously diaphanous breeze, makes you feel gently relaxed and cleansed of the clutter of day-time thoughts and preoccupations. Your mind begins to open like a nocturnal flower. The long school summer holiday starts tomorrow. Freed of the rigour of routine for six long weeks, possibilities – as yet not fully identified, shaped, and named– suggest themselves in vine-like temptations. There are chores – yes – plenty – which could easily occupy a part, at least, of every single day of the holiday. And there is of course my most major preoccupation – my 11 year old daughter – and our very important summer project – ensuring she has everything she needs for her own new beginning, this September, when she starts secondary school. But there should be, too, time for ‘other projects’ - plans – small dreams. I am suddenly thinking, today, of 40 years ago, when I was thirteen. Then, the life ahead seemed like a dazzle of complex and exciting possibilities – nothing could cloud the crystalline depth of this future pool into which I gazed awe-struck. But real life, it needn’t even be said, is usually nothing like those unblemished visions. The clarity of dreams and plans is fudged and muddled by the other events life brings our way, things we hadn’t thought of; of course. But still, there is ‘excitement’ in other, more unexpected forms. If not necessarily in the content of your life, or in the manner that you’d envisaged, though also sometimes in precisely those ways, too. Still later, a bit of ‘boredom’ may set in – the sense that, having perhaps been lucky enough along the way to find happiness within a good relationship, maybe having had a family too, a job you are comfortable with, and a nice place to live in – there is still something more to be discovered – some fresh new adventure to be had. But there’s a difference, now. Unlike being thirteen, when the visions were inflated - it was ‘big’ or nothing – and with the feeling that I would be trudging a doggedly singular path towards the envisaged horizon (successful clothes-designer, journalist – or just something ‘creative’ and ‘successful’), I have now the parts I hadn’t really planned or thought about – the best bits – the friendship of a family (and friends), a lovely place to live, and a job that I never imagined I would do but really like (and often love). Now, this sense that there’s something else trying to break through the membrane of my consciousness and say ‘this is it. This is what you need to do now’ is underpinned by the feeling that it’s not something I have to do alone, and nor does it have to be momentous to be worthwhile. I’m much older now, and finally, I think, a little bit wiser. I know that even small changes can make a difference to how you feel about your life. Our garden may illustrate the point somewhat.
In it’s small, part-shingled, part-planted, part-feral, untidy, imperfect interior, I now possess a tiny and equally informal ‘wild’ patch. It is not really wild of course. I use the term very elastically. It is not a square of soil I’ve just left to it’s own devices, waiting, week by week and inch by inch to see what might naturally spring up (if anything even did). It is instead a hotch-potch of less-than-healthy-looking herbs planted from pots bought at a local garden centre on ‘deals’. Broadcast between the dill, the curry plant, the two borage plants, the various lavenders, the sage (non-edible cultivar) hyssop, the rosemary, the meadow cranesbill, and the ‘chop suey’ (which I hadn't even known was actually a plant) were scatters of wild-flower seeds, some of which have germinated; and some not. The result is still an earthen square studded with plants, rather than my impatiently-awaited miniature green oasis. There are still empty brown spaces. The long hot dry spell has not assisted those plants transplanted from their familiar container-confinement into this arid, lumpen, free-draining soil - in a more ‘open’ and sunny part of the garden than the shadier parts where the shrubs dwell. But before the ‘plantings’ all that was recently left here was bare, infertile ground. The potatoes we’d grown had all been harvested and eaten - it's nutritive qualities thoroughly depleted by those delicious tubers. For a long time, I had been envisioning my own little place-for-pollinators, a space where the herbs would be left to grow thick and tall, and their associates had some reliable place in which to feed and shelter. So I suggested it. It happened. With the help of my husband. For a while, though, things hadn’t looked at all promising, as the new plants withered further in their new home under the endless days of scorching sunshine. But now, finally, with my husband adding a top-layer of compost to ramp up the soil-quality, and religious twice or thrice-daily waterings, there are new flower-buds forming on the weary lavender, and staring morosely at the borage’s browning leaves has given way to enchantment with small blue flowers spiky as elves’ hats. The chop-suey produces roughly one new sun-like flower each week. Many of the wild-flower seeds have germinated into curly stubblings of green, some grow longer now, and perhaps some may also flower this year, too. Best of all, these belated beginnings are finally attracting insects. Small insects, mostly. Small flies, tiny solitary wasps, hoverflies, micro-moths, and ants, of course. In the now-predictably sunny mornings a small kingdom can be witnessed in flight - little winged pencil marks investigate what nectar and pollen is on offer below. Butterflies pass over, ‘scenting’ with their feet, showing interest. This small ‘dream’ (three foot by three foot) has made a difference. To my life – it makes me feel more alive to tend it, to watch it, and to imagine it’s future. My husband is also involved; but the real difference, I feel, is in bringing more life – more insects - to the garden. Maybe even helping, marginally, to increase their numbers. When I was thirteen, I would never have thought so ‘small’.
