An Indian Summer Day

3rd September 2012 Monday

When I get up in the night it’s bright as daylight. I catch sight of the full moon beaming through the open bathroom window, a perfectly round silver ball, alone in a luminous sky - almost feels as if I’m spying on her. I always think of my niece in Beirut when I try and write about the moon - her moon poetry is a shimmering silk robe, makes you feel like royalty when you wear it.

Victoria plums for breakfast. My husband brought home a huge heavy bag of them from the allotment. Thankfully not as many as last year but still plenty to make jam and crumbles with. I slice them first instead of biting into the gorgeous pink blushed skin - wary of those little wriggling worms which secrete themselves in their gritty grooves next to the stone.

It’s a blue sky Indian summer morning  and I walk into town for a coffee and a catch up with a dear friend. We end up talking recipes and sharing green tomato stories. Even Monty Don on Gardeners’ World has suffered blight in his green house and lost his crop which makes me feel better about our red tomato loss.

Salad lunch outside. I sit under the shadow of the umbrella while my husband prefers the sun and the pussy cat lies his boney fur next to the brick wall  - his head under the shade of the trailing rosemary bush.

Proper tea in beautiful Wedgewood cups with another dear friend in her lovely home. We end up talking colour schemes for the bedroom which I’m planning to have re-decorated. She opens up a cornucopia of possibilities for me. John Lewis enters the coversation...

This eveing I bring in the washing, not completely dry, water the geraniums in their pots, and start chopping veggies for supper - an overgrown courgette which is nearly a marrow, hard whiskery carrots, bright lights chard, purple beans and crisp sweet onions - all grown by my husband - a triumph of persistance and slug pellets. 

Later he comes home all sunburnt and compost smeared after an afternoon on the allotment. And for a little while everything feels normal and I forget that I’m supposed to be forging another kind of normal. The one that starts and finishes with how it is today and not the one with footprints into the sunset.....