September Landing Lightly

Riversides, and carrying a bee back

Sunday, appropriately, and as if drawn by an invisible force (likely a deficiency of vitamin D after eighteen months in northern Scotland), I climbed awkwardly out through the rotting sash window and onto the roof to access what I thought might finally be sun, but although the roof itself was warm—creosote, flat and gritty, having absorbed heat from the full morning—the actual sun-star had retired behind an enormous wedge of cloud. I’d brought companions: some four-day-old polenta cake, a checked cotton blanket to provide a barrier between myself and the shells of seeds, thousands of them, accompanied by a scattering of miniature feathers and probably now the disappointment of birds at my occupying of their seeded territory—three feeders to one side above my head are empty of sparrows for the time being.

The herbs out here were planted in large terracotta pots—precariously via ladder—a couple of months ago and have been in dire need of water, though we didn’t realise until this moment when I tested the soil—desert-like. For whatever reason they dried out too quickly to contend with something or other, like the sun, like the lack of it, I don’t know. The purple basil we felt so thrilled by now a shrivelled dark crisp of a plant, but I feel slightly more hopeful about the situation after two bees visit the marjoram flowers.