New Moon Writing 2:  the sunset seat

At first, no one knew where to put the furniture in the new house.  All that was known for sure, was where the furniture should not be.

“That chair shouldn’t be up against the wall.  I don’t know where it would fit better, but it sure as hell can’t stay there!”

Boxes were unpacked, and things were put into places, and on top of other things.

The house haemorrhaged cardboard, as more items were delivered in additional boxes, but worse than that, the house didn’t smell like home.

It smelt and felt like cold concrete and plaster, and it was cold, hostile and didn’t sound familiar.  We continued to refer to the apartment, that we had left behind us in the city, as “home”, and we felt like visitors in the new place.

But for the gardens.

There is a modest front and back garden, at the front and back of the mid-terraced house, and one of the reasons we moved.

A robin was the first to remind us.

He was curious and friendly, and he came to look at us from the elder flower tree just near the back door and the kitchen window.  We gave him some sunflower seeds to apologise for the noise and disruption from the renovation, and to help him through the last of the wet and grey winter.  He came back for more, and he brought some sparrows and blue tits with him.  Someone said to stop feeding the birds during nesting season, or else the new chicks won’t learn how to feed themselves, so we stopped filling up the sunflower feeder in April.

Then the foxes came in May.

I saw a fox in the garden, early one morning and I was thrilled.  Nothing prepared me for how delighted I was a moment later, when I saw her four cubs following.  I stayed as quiet as the air, and I tried not to move or frighten them.  They’ve been visiting every couple of days since, and the cubs are getting big now.

After the rain came the slugs and the snails, which are our garden’s most unfortunate looking residents.  These ancient beings irrigate the soil and improve its quality and fertility.  You wonder how these ridiculously slow animals, with both their male and female sex organs on their heads, ever survived evolution, and are still here, keeping us company.

Perhaps they say the same things about us.

A neighbour, a few streets down keeps pigeons, and they come home to the coup every evening when he calls them.  And now the butterflies have arrived, and they must barge past the bees if they want to get to the flowers.  It’s good then, in hindsight, that the robin, blue tits and sparrows have made room in the elder flower tree, for these smaller things to feed. 

The butterflies are gloriously colourful, and I love watching them fly around the ever-changing garden.  Once they were caterpillars, but now they can fly.

Just before the sunset each evening, come the swifts, (or the swallows).

They swoop around, scooping up the insects.  They manoeuvre so elegantly, at great heights and at high speed, and for a while, I thought they were bats.  Everyone nodded kindly when I told them how much I liked the evening bat show, but it turns out they’re not bats at all.

It doesn’t matter if they’re called swifts, or swallows, just like it doesn’t matter where the furniture should be.  What matters most is that I have a sunset seat to watch this world I live in, and to observe the wildlife in suburbia. On my sunset seat, on this new moon, at midsummer, I watch the world that I’m a guest of, and I am in awe.