She's burning...

in dust and bones and delirious panting creatures.

Hello dear ones, thank you for being here again—and again and again—I can’t even begin to describe how very loved each of you make me feel.

I have been quiet over these last two months. It wasn’t my intention, summer has been a constant and violent battle of wills, her with her piercing light and sizzling heat, me with my stubborn, ‘but it’s summer, I have to be outside’. Too often she has won, too often I have been scorched both literally and emotionally, chased indoors while all inspiration lay scattered in unruly drifts like wayward seeds in a sirocco, each parched grain stranded in sweltering dust and tears. I had no words left nor even an image worthy of your time.

And still, as I sit at my desk, looking over hills that a dressed as dunes, I am not certain the hour is yet right, the air yet cool enough, words appear in ripples of light; they form, disappear, re-form again and are gone. So here, as they come and go, I have gathered those I could hold onto long enough to decipher. They are not soft as the light on lake ripples at dusk—the lake has no water left—they are as harsh as the hour is blisteringly and savagely hot.

August is burning, she is dust and bones and filled with delirious panting creatures.

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I want to write about cool silent days, the sort that make you think of light catching in raindrops on palest pink rose petals in May, but all I have is dried mint and wildfires!

So this is August; the well is dry, my garden scorched, plums have all fallen from their leafless branches sun-dried, wrinkled, already prunes as they land on earth too bruised and calcified by summer to cushion their landing. All the singing birds—except the jays and magpies and buzzards who surely must be made from wind and iron—have lost their singing voices. Everything, everything! that was green and golden and glorious is dying or already dead, turned to a faded-autumn colour so pale and light, the fields and the hill and the trees look like miles and miles of white sand drifting into an infinity of such clear monotonous white-blue sky I can hear its whispered wishes, ‘make me be grey, make me be rain’. I can no longer step outside without that my toes gather the dust of spring and my mouth dries instantly from breathing arid, still air and it burns—how it burns—and scratches my throat like sack-cloth rather than slipping past like silk. I am nothing but pain and veins in a dry, shrivelled skin.

Sonny, my love with nine lives drunk on life and hot alcohol.

Crickets and grasshoppers are all tiny, dehydrated skeletons still clinging to bleached fragile grasses and the leaves on my willow tree all fall together—the sound is not a susurration it’s a scream—just behind me as I check to what degree of disorderliness my sheep have degenerated from eating too many hot, fermenting plums. The river in the valley has no running water left, every one of thousands of troutlings are trapped in stagnant pools and I cannot do a single damn thing to save them. The maize is shrivelled, macabre acres of dried stunted plants that wild boar, with no fruit to forage on have trampled in a desperate tusked search for cobs that have not formed. Roe deer no longer run from the forests, they stagger, thirsty and starving to the coolest shaded spot they can find to sleep hoping the wishes of the sky fall upon them. Wild fires can be seen, too close and terrifying to ignore; we make evacuation plans.

Day after day of undiluted summer descend in day after day of ferocious heat from that hottest of stars hanging silent—deceptively lethal—in day after day of the clearest, palest azure-blue sky imaginable. But one can grow tired of azure blue—no matter how prettily it pales then flushes pink at the end of the day—quite abruptly in August. Tired, too, of searing white light and no clouds and no colour but for the shadows moving in perfect synchronicity with a star that forgets to twinkle so concentrated it is on blazing.

It is said, in these, one of the most rural of rural parts of France, that after the fifteenth day of this month summer is over, mornings freshen, the sun stops blazing, colour filters back over the landscape and all estival precocity condenses into the mists of autumn goodness.

Friday was the fifteenth, I wait prune like, to be rejuvenated. To be plum again.

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In the nameless hour before the spell is broken.

BRIEFLY…

Pine Marten; a message written in a reply to

Jonathan Foster

on his hauntingly beautiful essay The Shimmering Ghost;

…there was a commotion in the chicken house, then, sheep bleating under an almost full moon - signs of not normal goings-on. I tore out to the field, bare feet kicking up dust in the immoveable heat of an August evening still trying its best to suffocate all brave enough to move and found a half starved pine marten attempting to chew through the wire mesh on the open window of the coop. She barely had the strength to hold herself up yet she continued while I watched, also unusual but a undoubtedly a sign of her desperation.

Pine Martens are a beautiful creature, it is said that were they to be the size of a tiger the human race would be in mortal danger, so masterful is their ability as predator. But, this was small, a youngster, exhausted by lack of food and water and eventually she slumped, panting hot air—I have never seen a pine marten pant—she slunk off back towards the woods, a sad picture of defeat.

I couldn't help feel her desperation, her hunger, so I closed the window on the coop and went in search of food and water which is how I found myself, barely clad in the middle of a stifling night, rummaging in the freezer for a small morsel of something, anything that might sustain her, defrosting it and leaving it raw on the ground by a bowl of water in the woods where I know she has often left her traces.

This morning it was gone, of course, another starving creature may have happened by, I far rather hope it was her.

Deer; through heatwaves wavering across the lane under a huge red sun drizzling onto the parched horizon, a deer appears from the field. It is not running, neither does it attempt to when it sees me. Too listless from the heat, exhausted, panting, desperate for water and spring green, it staggers down the banking, slips on arenose layers of silvery grasses, lands in an untidy heap of legs and sun-faded fur and moves no further. Three curious crows fly over, just low enough to decide if its eyes, glinting in the last of the sunlight are alive or dead, if the creature is still breathing. They too are thirsty, fly away unrefreshed. I know they will return.

Badger; a badger lays silent, motionless in its beautiful mottled grey bristles, black and white face peaceful, devoid of life at the edge of the woodland. There are no signs of human skulduggery, it simply lay down and life departed. When I return to the same edge of woodland, just two days later, every edible part has been devoured, all that remains is an empty, flat, still bristled skin. My heart is so heavy with tears I am uncertain I can carry the weight of its sadness a step further, uncertain I can continue to witness the ravages of this month of August to which there seems to be no end.

Hare; on a morning when the hill is just emerging from the rawness of a night awakening under a low sky neither blue nor grey, when trees everywhere are stilled by exhaustion from too many arid, suffocating days, when all is still veiled in that nameless hour before the rest of the sleeping world steps through to tare open the silence, I am walking, my breathing gentle, shaped by morning air—the veil no more light than it is dark, no more heavy than it is weighty—and absolute, pristine quiet. Beyond the low sky, ahead of me on a bend in the lane I am halted by a sound. I neither breathe or move, try to still my beating heart even. Not quite believing as I watch the small miracle that is three leverets playing catch-me-if-you-can in circles around a tired and gnarled chestnut tree on the bank. Their long legs fly out behind them as they leap, ears flatten, whiskers and black and white tails twitch, their eye’s as bright as kind stars. I believe, if hares could laugh, they would be laughing. They are children of the earth making poems of the morning and as I stand on my hill, such a visceral part of me, I am mesmerised once again. And, just a tiny bit hopeful, that not all of our un-human, furred, feathered and finned kin are lying panting or dying.

The heat drew all the moisture from the land and the leaves and the rivers and lakes and the maize curled at its ends. And, hiding in all of this desiccated devastation the sun hangs over a family of boar, panting (as are all creatures) waiting, dreaming, hoping… for rain.

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With love and hope for all small and large panting creatures

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Note; I have read so many beautiful essays and stories over these last stifling days they warrant a post of their own, expect that very soon.