Cake and Pollen Gold

Thursday 20th January

Day 274

Four bananas in the fruit bowl - each day their skins get thinner and more black speckled. Their tropical ripe smell hovers in the air - a hot mirage in the cold kitchen. I mash them with a fork and fold them into a cocoa smudged cake mixture along with a bar of seventy percent dark chocolate splintered into sharp shards. I melt thick white honey in a pan to glaze it with later. While it bakes in the oven, warming the kitchen with the promise of teatime I take my secateurs into the garden and attack the frost stung stems of last summer’s begonias and lillies and long trailing tails of nasturtiums. Under the honeysuckle hedge where the sun can’t reach, the soil in the pots is frozen, black and solid as chocolate.

Cutting back the dead sticks of the mallow geranium I uncover small pink heart buds, close to the earth, curled and furled and full of the spring which I’d forgotten was coming. Bringing back the light. Flying in like the honey bee, his legs laden with pollen gold to illuminate my dark corners.