We’ve been in the new house more than a month now. The best gifts we’ve been brought, like the company that has gathered here, linger in the kitchen: rosemary in a jug, lemon balm and oregano strung up on a hook on the wall, a glass of pelargonium snatchings in water the colour of pale tea.
So far, we have made our home of dust and boxes, one unexpected visit from the boiler man and a handful of long meals under low lighting (so few fittings, so few working bulbs, none of the technical knowledge to fix them). In the past week the work we have been able to read on the sofa. A heartsease.
Today was the first time the light felt like September: bright and clear and lower than usual. A friend and I went hunting for the fancy houses, and I took her to my favourite street in all of London, which starts with a cottage and works its way - through grand Georgian town houses and squat Thirties semis - to terraces with large windows full of glass so old they refract the light. We admired the trees and the art in people’s kitchens. She stroked a lawn made of camomile. We got conned out of wearing our jumpers but things felt fresh. September brings the air, and with it relief.
Summer has been strange and long-short, neither one nor the other but somehow both at once. I have been trying to get to know the garden, but know that our relationship is biding its time. For weeks, now, I have been craving the colder, darker days. I want to potter out there in a puffer jacket, see my breath, crunch the grass underfoot. These are times when, traditionally, the gardening stops, but I think I know these moments will be necessary this winter.
Much of my time in the garden has been spent feeling my way. I’ve wrestled weed-suppressant matting from under a blanket of dusty compost and marvelled at the tight, firm clay underneath. I’ve swung tools aged with the work of others’ hands at soil I underestimated the strength of. I’ve unearthed weeds and sown seeds. All of it has been with an inhale of hope that won’t be released for months yet, a thing the size of my lungs that clings to a chance it’ll work.
Inside, things are faster: bookshelves have gone up, paint, too. Downstairs, in the warm sunspot of the bedroom, seeds rest on blocks of compost. We’re not sleeping in there at the moment, but I check on them nevertheless. Last night I found the fuzz of roots. This morning, seed leaves. If I can usher them through - big if - there will be cornflowers with the summer.
