Fogbow delirium...

Seven peach trees and an unexpected Indian summer...

Hello dear readers, writers, curious passers by, welcome new subscribers, thank you all for being here.

I am writing from my desk under an open window looking out across hills that are stubbornly refusing to dress in autumn colours, I too am dressed in light, airy clothes usually folded away, forgotten until spring because the air is unseasonably warm here, a relief after Septembers’ wintry cold and oh I’ve basked like a butterfly with wings open to gather every ray of sun!

For two weeks the balmy warmth of an Indian summer sun I thought would never feel, has shone down, it felt/still feels like serendipity and I can’t help a smile of merciful thanks. Because I am thankful, deeply so. To be alive, breathing in fresh warm air on days when I least expected it, when I haven’t had to work and now, still, on days when I do.

So I write to you—belatedly, bronzed and beaming—of seven peach trees that are no longer and of my inner child on a shimmering morning walking in the unforgettable sight of two fogbows. The first—and second—I have ever seen.

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To begin…

The ritualistic writing of a list of things to do gives me a Delphian pleasure. That it will lay forgotten on my desk while I, deluded by the thought of fourteen empty days stretching in front of me to attend to each and every chore, a foregone conclusion. I write regardless, the simple action of doing so an intentional beginning to the continuation of the deception of empty days. I won’t bore you with the details, suffice to say this one, as will the next and the next, very much resembles every other list I write at the start of every other holiday.

It is written, then abandoned instantaneously.

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Stepping into the gloaming - Sunday 20 October 2024 - The silence of fog hanging in the glow of dawns half light is almost—not quite—as silent as that of snow fallen thick and heavy in the night. Both cover the landscape with a blanket of hush so loud it often wakes me.

For those who of you who are new to A Hill and I; my love of misty mornings is no secret, few things will see me leaping from the cosy comfort of slumber, throw myself into the dark, and damp faster than a foggy morning. My husband, who has never understood what draws me to such lunacy no longer even questions the why, he accepts and ignores and turns over. This was one such morning…

Like a child, in pyjamas I roam…

Night has yet to liquify into day, dreaming ends abruptly, I sit up in bed.

A sense—I don’t know which one, apparently there are twelve, most I cannot name—woke me when the eerie light of moonlit fog filtered through my half open shutters formed a puddle on my bed clothes, rippling when I moved my legs. Fascinating, milky light speaking to me in a language I think maybe only fog chasers could possibly understand, it is a calling; the first line of a story waiting to wrap its mysterious pages around me just as tiny pipistrelle bats flit to darker places, close their wings, wrap them around their bodies to sleep.

Bed clothes are thrown off, socks found, I pull something woolly over pyjamas—it doesn’t matter what—take silent steps through a still sleeping house, drag on wellies, grab camera, step over creaky floorboards into the damp of trillions of droplets shimmering in the street light. I tingle with anticipation; a new story waiting to unfold, how it will roll and curl onto the pages. I am thinking of other mornings filled with the wild, exhilarating expectation of dissolving into morning light. Each are unique, each hold faint contours, secrets wrapped in as yet, unspoken words.

“One can’t write directly about the soul, looked at, it vanishes.” Virginia Woolfe

Alone in obscurity but for the whispered rustlings of wild things, the silence is absolute. I turn up the lane and walk into the blur, the distance is neither near or far. Nothing has form until I stand either under or beside it; even the old oak is invisible but for one wayward branch poking through, determined to outdo the fog. I have no plan, only a desire to walk anywhere and nowhere in particular, to wander aimlessly and endlessly with all senses buzzing—different from fizzing.

I am a solitary, pyjama clad, ecstatic child, playing in myriad filigree fingers of light appearing as the sun burns through the damp. As daylight melts into night. I evaporate into the mysterious nowhere. Here there is no need to pretend.

Filigree fingered light melting dark…

I am thinking; is there a love affair deeper than that which lies between the soul and a land it has come to know like a son or daughter.

I am dancing; in my head because my boots make any step other than one in front of the other too difficult.

I am singing; to myself because the silence is too beautiful to spoil.

I am walking; to the top of the hill because the morning is calling through waves of fog and I cannot think of a reason not to do so.

I am a child, playing her favourite game.

The château from the back of the hill just as the mist is beginning to let and fade - hidden within, silent stones.

I float on; I am a child with wings traversing Le Paradis.

“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

The château, usually an unwilling participant in enticement or enchantment guarded as it is by ferocious keepers—animal and human—this morning abandons its facade. Misty curtains fall open, its stoic resistance to kindling imagination fractures, unveils its crumbling allure nestled, comfortably ancient between rock and earth. As if all pugnacity dissolved in passing wisps of the morning’s ephemerality, redesigned by nature; a fairy castle on the hill.

I dance on. The pages turn. A half moon lingers in a sky painted cerulean blue. The fog lifts and falls again, undecided on destination or form it shrouds and reveals, each revelation a new page.

I hear muffled airborne chimes, two church clocks distinct in the obscurity, one from the town of Aubin to the West, the other from Ruhle to the East, they are not quite synchronised—when are religions ever—the metallic sound falls on the silence of misty pages echoes down and back up the other side of the valley, holy ghosts in melodic combat neither can win.

Orchestral manoeuvres are fading behind me, my whole body is smiling, a child wrapped in adult dances on along the ridge into an arc of fog, my smile reflected as if in strange heavenly symmetry. For many seconds I am stilled in euphoric incomprehension as to what I am seeing, what I am walking through even.

Is the child still dancing or has she stepped into a secret ritual of ancestral relevance the like of which she has never before heard of much less beheld?

Is the witnessing, the walking under—for I am already—going to break the incantation? Can I touch such a phenomenon? I glance behind me at the light I am walking through, turning back, I am halted again as the miracle of a second arc, white and luminous appears ahead. I, still the child, am soaring in the chasm of liminal space into an in-between world that is nothing but a fading, distant memory before I realise both are completely, irretrievably dispersed.

A warm—too warm for fog—sun shines and the moon fades into the pages of a story I know has ended.

When I—returned to adulthood with residual child tagging behind—burst through the kitchen door, without recounting one word of my morning my husband takes one look at my euphoric delirium and says, ‘whatever you had for breakfast, I want the same!’

“It is a happy talent to know how to play.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

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From the land…

I cannot stop smiling in the sunshine. November arrives but has forgotten to carry all its usual melancholy, the sky is bluer than blue.

In the vegetable garden seven peach trees, grown from kernels I planted ten years ago, have never given me any fruit. They have grown so large they cast shaded light where it is least wanted. I feel terrible guilt, whisper words of comfort—you are from genetically modified origins, it is not your fault you cannot produce as other peach trees do, you were beautiful, you will be feasted from in other ways—but spend two afternoons with my old bowsaw cutting them all down with such grief that I cry. I try to compensate, leave enough stump for regrowth to give them a second chance saying a quiet prayer that they will. I leave small branches for four delighted sheep to devour their sweet leaves and throw the remains on the bonfire, their trunks, I stack to dry for turning on the lathe. They will become candlesticks, or perhaps bowls to hold peaches from more productive trees would be more fitting…

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Brushed copper - November light over Le Paradis

In the coppery dusk of slow autumn light.

There are just six short weeks to winter solstice, I have yet to walk through deep fallen leaves, yet to lay in the decay of more colourful days, though the scent is in the air, yet to feel the seep of wintery mornings gathering force on my skin. Autumn falters, paused in Indian summer sun which I have asked, no I have begged to stay for as many days as it cares to give. They will no doubt be few but they will be welcomed.

I am trying not to think about the ‘C’ word, but it seems to be impossible when the shops are already filling their shelves with everything I want to forget and my husband asks daily for lists…

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Forever in hope of autumn gold but loving the gold that’s given.

With love always

Susie X

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Something I loved this week.

I am not sure how I stumbled upon

Alun Hughes

, a new name to Substack, welcome Alun, but I’m very glad I did!

Alun writes with great affinity to the land, rivers and trees from and around his home in Dorset in the West Country of England…

Here was the water, travelling as itself, over our leftovers, across our debris. Again, I was confronted with ‘the empty’…

Trout Clans

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