seasons – Page 36 – don't confuse the narrator

happy hollydays

Yesterday was the solstice, the shortest day, and, officially, the first day of winter in the northern hemisphere.

When I get back to the village, maybe we’ll burn a yule log to encourage the sun to return.

It seems awfully late in the season, but we still have lots of insects about. As soon as the sun comes out, the ivy is busy with honey bees and wasps, and I found this green bug-eyed monster on the verandah earlier on today:

notes for a November poem

The trees are ragged with Autumn. The wind nags
and worries scabby leaves. I see the skyline fray;
black scraps tear off to become
a join-the-dots of rooks that threads
across unbroken grey. Virginia creeper
pours an oxblood waterfall
down the garage wall and yellow tears drift
under the willow. No still small voice
commands me from the prunus.
The pine trees fluff green fur and mist
purls over the estuary.

Published in Envoi 142 some years ago, and clearly based on November in the UK, not in Spain. Today, though, is unexpectedly wet and autumnal, so it seems a good time to post it.
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plane speaking

I find it very strange – though in some ways, quite comforting – that one of the most popular trees in public gardens and plazas in this part of Spain is what I thought was a London plane. Perhaps even more strange is the fact that the Latin name is Platanus x hispanica. Why should a London plane be “hispanica“? Not to mention the questions arising concerning their relationship to plátanos, which is Spanish for bananas.

days of damp and mushrooms

The village is celebrating its jornadas micológicas this weekend, which means that the local restaurants are offering all sorts of weird and wonderful fungal specialities. I don’t expect to be indulging, having had a bad reaction a couple of years ago.

Instead, I have been out observing the hongos on the lawn. Although the weather is beginning to be autumnal and the fog was so thick this morning that I thought we’d lost the orchard, we had more mushrooms last weekend, I think. Certainly more variety.
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