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| Summer fruit - the June raspberries and blackcurrants |
The letter poems feel exciting and I have been waking up thinking about them. In odd moments when I'm gardening or cleaning, I think about the next one. They run parallel to the poems I've been writing about age (coincidentally, the postman's just delivered the latest copy of The North with some of those age poems in).
I remember reading in an interview with Paul Muldoon that it's a good idea to keep writing at a distance for as long as possible. Well the summer's done that for me. A summer of change, a house full most of the time (wonderful), the allotment and cleaning.
I used to write every day. I might go back to that, but my pile of notebooks has barely changed. I have spent a lot of time wondering how people manage to produce dozens of books, what productivity actually means. I don't have an answer. I am envious of people who are driven but perhaps have always been too much of a grasshopper. I want time to make things other than with words.
Giya turns 21 on September 12 and that somehow marks a real turning point, more than being 60. Both her and Mrisi, then, will have passed that symbolic line into adulthood.
But other than all the change, there are constants like harvesting to do and trying to catch spiders to get them out of the window. Spider season's come early, autumn raspberries are just starting to ripen but they're taking their time because it's been so cold. They needed this recent sun but the heads are heavy with unripe fruit that may yet come to nothing if the temperatures drop again. The apples have done well. Even early in August, the Discoveries were fabulous.
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| Outside a shop in Steyning |