I am coming up for air again after a tough couple of months, picking up the threads of normal life. Dad’s health started to decline badly last month and our days were filled with the trip to and from Galashiels and increasingly painful, powerless, bedside vigils. Ishbel and Lachlan came home and, as Ishbel took over the driving, I painfully realised how much I had relied on the concentrated act of driving to stiffen my sinews. On the 25th Dad died, but it was peaceful and we were all there. Funeral arrangements then took the place of the twists in the Coldstream – Boswells road, keeping me busy. That went off as well as these things can on the 15th. It was good to see family and old friends and share a laugh about some of Dad’s more ridiculous exploits. For anyone who knew him and couldn’t make the funeral I’ve attached a link to my memoir piece here -which, if he was here, he would complain was shamelessly copied from his stories and then made less funny…
And now Mum and I are gradually reflating, pottering about in the garden, walking the dog, looking ahead a little. Today we combined a trip to the butchers with a walk along the Tweed.
We have had another change in the wind and found ourselves tousled left and right by blustery gusts of warm, summer scented air. There is a strange temporal collision at play. All around there are signs of harvest and imminent autumn, clusters of ash keys, glowing rowan and glistening brambles, and yet summer seems reluctant to cede place. A second flush of flowering by meadowsweet, campion and comfrey created an incongruous juxtaposition with darkening seedheads of hogweed. Fragrant wild camomile flowers clustered bravely around the dystopian blackened stalks of fodder beans. Though the spikes of fireweed have turned to smokey haze of seed heads, the verges were still glowing purple, now filled are filled with spikes of purple woundwort. Irrepressible tendrils of bindweed clambered up bare umbellifer stalks to give them glamorous new flowerheads.
Where the path leading to the river has been mulched with chipping, myriad tiny fungi have emerged, Hattifatteners reaching for the light. My dear friend George Oogle tells me these are Clavaria fragilis, otherwise commonly known as fairy fingers, white worm coral or white spindles. These are often found in woodland litter so I have high hopes for the giant heap of mulch I am saving for the back track.
Navigating through the tousled thistles at the edge of the track, Lyra was joyful to finally find her first stubble field of the season. After months of dutifully walking in narrow rectangles round the headrigs, at last she could romp any which way – and did. I followed, skiting precariously on the slithery rain soaked straw, trying to entice her back through the gap, the only point of egress accessible to anyone over 2 foot high. In the end she did graciously relent and, foregoing her preferred shortcut to the bridge, did not make me limbo through the barbed wire at the end of the field.
The river is angler’s oxter high again following a night of persistent rain and was rushing along in wrinkles and crinkles. Salmon were jumping, giving much cheer to the jovial chaps in waders (who reassured me that as real anglers they would be putting any they caught straight back). Lyra enjoyed a couple of convivial paddles, just out of fly casting range, and we drove home again to the seductive aroma of chienne mouillée.
