Outside, it smelled like holidays. I tell myself I’ve become an early riser with age, but this suggests it’s always been the case; that scent of hot morning air is one from childhood, when I would get up before everyone else and go outside. Nectarine, sound of a distant sprinkler, waiting for the day to wake up.
There are no people in the woods at 6am. Even the parakeets, who, come summer, bleat for most of the day, are silent. Instead the chatter is from smaller, less colourful things. Occasionally, detritus falls from the tree canopy to the dusty path underfoot, and it is quiet enough to hear it land. Spiders sit in the middle of their webs, single leaves twist on silk like a Victorian magic trick. And I amble.
It’s probably the last time I’ll take a dawn walk in these woods; we will only sleep within their shadow for a few more nights. The new home awaits us, plaster-dusty and with boxes for furniture. When we are there, painting or planning or eating pasta on our laps on chairs positioned as if around a table, but with the table in bits, I forget that to be there is to leave here. For a long time now it has been a haven, holding my familiar things and a sense of order. But this week I have been packing, and now there are boxes here too. Soon it will be empty. The removal people are booked for Wednesday evening.
I’ve started to mentally clock the last time things. The last time we sit up on the hill, watching an eggy sun spill over the city. The last time I pass through the prairie gardens on the way home from Tesco. The last time I walk out onto the balcony after waking up. Sad, but necessary. We have lived in two places for several years now. Over the past few months, having to be in just the one has been strangely delicious.
The woods are cool, the air makes the skin on my arms prickle. They’ll stay this way all day, even as the mercury creeps up. Their more southerly end is straddled by a defunct railway arch, one covered in a changing array of street art and ivy, the kind of backdrop that I’m amazed hasn’t hosted a lockdown rave yet. To stand in front of this is to notice a distinct drop in temperature. A place where the sunlight never quite reaches, where the woods stop.
But elsewhere summer marches on. The open land that once fizzed with cow parsley now holds rosebay willowherb, not yet in full flush but competing with blooming bindweed nevertheless. The pond, once dotted with yellow flag irises, is overgrown and sullen. The leaves have lost their luminescence, that strange chemical yellow of spring. Duller, now. The fiddleheads that marked longer days in April and May are now chest-high fronds, the brambles take fenceposts into their fold.
Not wild, not yet - there are still dens made by human children, the echoing thrum of a police helicopter - but rather a kind of aftermath. Perhaps it’s the time of day, or the fact I’m missing festivals, but there is the air of a hangover here. Remnants of a party from the night before, new light on a revelry that never happened.
The light has changed when I head back to the estate: strong and golden, picking out every leaf in its path. You can hear the road from here, and the parakeets. The day has woken up. Later we will sweat, and suffer lightly, and drink champagne in the garden.
