The Art of Savouring Summer Abundance
Summer has arrived in earnest. She showed her face in much more muted tones until recently — a growing tomato plant, a sunny afternoon, bees hovering over primrose. When spring arrives it comes on the coattails of winter and so it has a blush of melancholy. We look to the future as we pop seedlings into trays, but behind us are the dark days of winter whose cool winds swirled around us until very recently. I sometimes struggle to leave the dormant season of winter behind me as I walk blinking into the bright sun. Seductive as lemonade and cotton dresses are, I hold fast to the comforts of winter — the hot soups, the big wool jumpers, the overcast day. Winter seems to ask less of us. It’s hard to hide when the world is waking up, but in winter, when nature sleeps, we lay low ourselves. Night wraps round us early and we have our morning cups of tea in the dark. This winter I read that the writer Jeanette Winterson keeps her lights off after dark. I tried it once. It was soft and reflective, but I grew impatient and went back to my electricity-dependent lifestyle. As well as intimidating, the dark can be consoling. I miss the dark in summer. I see so little of her.
My sweet peas are as bushy as jungle plants now. The lupins are tall and showy. The daisies are leggy, they wisp about in the cool summer breeze. I sat in the meadow today. There was a symphony around me of insect and bird song. Their notes are out of sync and out of tune with one another and yet in their very asynchronousness, they’re also perfect. Summer is such a showy season. It’s like Winter and spring have been a kind of green room for the theatre of summer, a time when Mother Nature restores and then grooms her collection of oddities, her most avid performers, and even the reluctant late bloomers, she coaxes them all to become part of her spectacular cabaret of wonder. With all this cacaphony going on, I can feel rather quiet inside. It is so much to take in and it seems so unlikely that such a showcase is on display for such a very long summer’s day that the audacity of it all can be silencing. What can one say that goes anywhere near the wonder of it all? How can it be that there is such an incredible amount of abundance on Earth? In my meadows, despite the background knowledge of biodiversity loss and specifically of the loss of native meadows in the UK, I still feel the quiet awe I felt of a child, a sense of well-being that feels right somehow.
