Well, not exactly. But last night I ordered some fresh gardening supplies and started looking at seed catalogues. (Mostly heritage and organic.) I haven’t grown anything in some years. I had built out two raised vegetable beds at the end of the garden, behind the chicken coop, but due to the heavy travel over the last couple of years I didn’t do anything with them. Tonight I decided that, in between the travel and the work that will eat up a series of small bites out of the year, I will grow things again. Maybe my kid will help out, on returns from university, just as she always did when she was younger. But maybe it’ll be just me pottering around out there on my own, which will also be perfectly fine. My dad raised flowers in his later years, which seemed mostly an excuse to go into extended single combat with the snail kingdom, and when I was little my uncle would produce disturbingly large marrows and onions in his back garden, a competition gardener who would defend his grotesque creations from the crows by leaving dishes of whisky out for them, and then later collecting the shitfaced birds into a sack and driving them off in the back of his car, in order to dump them in someone else’s field to sober up.
This, as they say, is England. This is what we do when it’s time to withdraw from the road. Cause the soil to spit up terrible things and get the crows pissed as the sun goes down.
(fragment, written January 2015. I only just got around to planting some of those seeds.)