The tablet dissolving in the glass next to me just tried to compete with the wind outside. For a few seconds the frequencies overlapped creating an unequal duet.
Behind the single pane windows of the room is darkness still. But the short day ahead is inevitable.
It was a windy night. And it was longer than the one before it. The big tree outside will soon completely change its colour. It’s more the colour of its summer dress really, that will shift and soon the big tree will be naked, waiting for the snow to push gently on its branches as it settles there again and again.
I wonder what will happen to the smaller tree next to it, the one held in perpetual fall, its leaves constantly yellow, possibly because the giant next to it has rationed any nutrients.
It would be interesting to have a glimpse at the rings of their wood. It must be that the small one has a completely different internal structure, built over time from a life of deprivation. Making it stronger.
I could obviously be completely misinterpreting the situation. Perhaps the little yellow tree is a very peculiar species that decided that looking as if the death of winter were coming all year is the way to go. I certainly have feelings for it. Poor tree.
I should probably stop being so childish and learn more about the habits of that living organism.
The sound of wind I hear now is really the leaves of the trees, of course. I wonder if one could recognise the makeup of a forest just by listening to the sound of wind filtered through it.
That’s probably something many generations, many generations before us were able to do and able to appreciate too. They possibly had to, were they to survive, feeding off the life coming from the forest.
Just two gardens north from here is a tree that has recently died. I wonder if Evan Christian himself planted it to compliment his home. Klippan House was built with such care that even the joinery in the basement was described as having stop chamfered beams and joints. But the tree is dead now. It will slowly begin to dry and lose the flexibility in its branches, the trunk and possibly even the roots.
It will likely need to be cut down or it could be pushed too hard by the wind and fall on the historic manmade structure next to it. And I wonder if it possibly died because the garden behind the Klippan House has been turned into a barren geometric space, to please someone. That in stark contrast to the Heath, just meters from here on the other side of East Heath Road.
Trees there are seemingly allowed to die with dignity, giving birth to new ones from their possibly massive interconnected root systems.
Perhaps the fallen trees are very much like the leaves, and if I stopped looking at everything from my own familiar scale, then I would notice that over time the circumstances of the place help to turn it into something it wants to be all along. It’s inevitable.
There will be trees here possibly long after the people are gone and their houses and their ideas and the memory of them. And even after the trees will be gone, the wind is still going to be shifting from place to place, as the planet will keep its dervish dance around the little star tumbling into the irresistibility of the black hole at the centre of the galaxy.
Perhaps life on the small tree that seems to be in perpetual fall is the best kind of life in the garden. It might be that this island and the weather patterns passing through it does not allow for the intellect to pave over the magic we have loved so much before we were human or when we were first children, calling certain plants trees and a certain star the sun. The day is inevitable, and so is the night after it.
But really they are just passing impressions in the larger scheme of things.
I should make another tea.
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