I am back in Dubai after a month away and half of 2021 is done. Midsummers day (a misnomer right ?) has gone. This was the meant to be the year that things opened up and I was hoping that I could get back into a normal pattern of travel from the Gulf to Herefordshire. The joy of jumping on a jet for a long weekend and having just 4 days of noisy boys and bees. Not possible again despite my jabs. People the world over have had their lives disrupted and holidays and weddings trashed - worse - loved ones taken before their time and businesses broken. So I know it seems churlish for me to write publicly and dwell on missing out on missing the seasons at home.
This year I left on January 4th and made it home to see the place in June. Jane wrapped in her beds, borders and bulbs and the boys coming and going from school and university. Time spent at home now starts to feel like a dream or a ration of normality.
I escaped via Athens - we met in an Amber country to see out ten days and grab a holiday and then I had a further ten days quarantine on return to Herefordshire. Quarantining at Oaklands in June is a not a chore. Oaklands is turning out to be a beautiful place in the early Summer. Our first potatoes were emerging from the raised beds and I was sent down to the wild garlic patch at the bottom our wood to pick their leaves. I can't recall having freshly dug new potatoes with foraged wild garlic leaves and good butter before in my life. Chiff chaffs and Blackcaps were singing in the wood as I pottered back up to the house with my bucket feeling blessed with such a bounty. Sun piercing the wood now in the areas we have cleared. Clear birdsong and last of the bluebells - some of the patches I had planted nice months before still showing. Moments are important - if you string enough of them together and stop to appreciate them you piece together a richer life. Nature heals and nature rewards.
The "meadow" as we hopefully call it was in a state of interesting chaos. It can take me an hour with a Collins Handbook to try to identify what is probably one common wild flower. So I gave up promising more study. But again there were signs that some of our inputs from last year were paying off. Jane wrote today about a large patch of Yellow Rattle sown to start to weaken the grass. I am not sure why I am surprised that when you do things in a garden you get a result. That's the essence of gardening and looking after any land I have learned but this whole process is still so new to me I am just filled with wonder and quiet satisfaction when something survives and takes hold. If I am still writing with a sense of amazement and bewildered accomplishment in twenty years then that will be a good thing in my book. What ever lose that wonder. How can we ever take the stewardship of this few acres for granted. Because it had been a lifetime's dream to re-escape the Cities and settle on our own piece of ground - probably adapted from a smallholding to this more aesthetic offering - it does always chime for me with meaning. It is both the end and beginning of our story. It now really feels like coming home in every sense of what that means.
It is not all poetry. I also love the tiny childlike steps of being practical. My adventures in wood piles have a new home. Elliot my eldest and I took delivery of a wood shed kit and spent a happy afternoon figuring the out how the pieces fit together and prior to that how to operate a drill that had been unused since the time I hung a passed down corner cupboard upside down with Jane's brother Mick. After a couple of hours we succeeded and stood back in the manner of all men from the aisles of B&Q to admire our handiwork.
Wood is thankfully something we will never be short of but sadly I was soon short on time and counting down the days to the plane back to my other home in Dubai. But I will be back to burn logs when the seasons turn. Logs I have cut, carried, split and stacked.
I feel that this year is running away from me at Oaklands. I have spent less than a month at the property and we are already in July. Trying to catch moments and slow things down before the year runs away. Every day at Oaklands for me is literally precious and when I return to the "Sand" as we call it here I look back and wonder if I spent my time well. My last day I just walked around and tried to soak the place into myself. Like a green balm to see off the desert heat. Looking at the garden from every angle and sitting in the wood and watching one bird for a good thirty minutes living in the space. When I tell people that I am looking forward to literally going home one day, not too soon but not too distant and spending a whole year at Oaklands - every day and never leaving - and seeing a whole year round and going nowhere - I mean it. I have had the reverse of most peoples Covid experience. Covid has locked my home and family apart from me rather than locked us all up together. I am conscious that this sounds like a entitled moan. We all have had our own losses in the last two years. What I do know is that I could not have kept going in the last year without Oaklands. The thought that it's there and waiting and home.
Comments