Outside to Inside By Judy Mitchell

Spring. Days of gentle optimism unfurled and grew steadily longer.  Bright lime shoots pushed from the soil and nest builders, eager and bold, darted into hidden places, their beaks full of wriggling food.  The restless wren flew to her new orb of woven grasses, twigs and moss through a tiny door facing away from the chill wind that shook the dry clematis tangled over the arch. In May, bees rushed to the pendulous branches of the apple tree and swooped to trampoline inside the white blossom.  Fat, orange rosebuds swelled in the sun and pots squatted under the open kitchen window, full of crimson blooms like harlots’ petulant mouths. Propped flower spires reached into strangely quiet skies and netted fruit plumped and blushed as the earth grew warm.   Twelve weeks of waiting and watching as the sun climbed higher and the numbers started to fall.            

We came up for air for a few rushed, summer weeks of partial respite but it hadn’t gone away. It regrouped and skulked in corners, a technicolour conker ready to use its grappling hooks to dig into our soft beds of flesh.  Now, I’m inside, looking out, waiting for the rain to stop in these dark, shortening days.  The garden is shucking its wet, green layers down to spiky, bare branches silhouetted against the drab sky over a no man’s land of fallen leaves. A conical tree stands by the fence.  It has only one leaf.  The last remnant of its lush foliage of summer.  It flick-flacks in the irregular gusts.  An obstinate dried leftover, futilely resisting the scourge of the north wind.  I continue reading but am drawn back to the parallel branches until the light fades. I listen to the buffeting rain and wind against the glass and the shushing of the dishwasher full of hot pots.  It’s Sunday. The lingering smell is of lunch, roast meat, vegetables.

In the morning, the solitary leaf has gone. The tree is bare.