July Lied

Photos and musings of buildings and nature on an overcast day in my ordinary town

It’s July and I should be disappointed.

I know I should be.

The distinct lack of sunshine.

I should be Wimbledonning, eating strawberries and sipping Pimms….

I should be glamping at a festival in over priced pink wellies or sat in a meadow making daisy chains…..

I should be at the seaside.

I think……

‘Should’ makes up so much of life, doesn’t it?

What a trickster it is, convincing us we are meant to be elsewhere. How much of life do we devote to better versions we invent and pine for, instead of cherishing imperfect fragments of our actuality?

As I leave my Yorkshire cottage and set off down the hill into town, I decide to embrace what is. This eerie portrait of a day dangling before me, dour and sour.

I invite my inner goth to revel in the dark rags marbling cloud above me. To hold hands with the hanging ache of heaven.

To notice what I have, rather than bemoan the July I feel I should be having, elusive orgasm of the calendar year.

The first things to catch my eye are plants. The flourish of thistles, punk like purple hair and spikes.

Next, the oyster buds of brambles, cradled by the barbs of over protective runner mothers. A reminder, that the juiciest fruit follows flower. That, the best, may be yet to come.

A little further down, come the garden blooms; the cultivated - precious and haughty.

They peer from yards, a true ‘garden party’ ensemble - proud peonies and shy wallflowers. Sunflowers court attention, whilst thorned roses demand respect.

As a child I never liked hydrangeas. Considered them an ‘old person’s’ flower. They reminded me of dowdy, dumpy cauliflower florets. Today I appreciate the fades I notice in them. The grandeur they offer in their subtlety. Some blooms, I muse, allow others to shine, ‘backing singers’. Not everyone is meant to be a cameo rose, after all.

Lady’s Mantle are another specimen I did not love until later life. Over the years, I’ve warmed to their umbrella like leaves, the gold of them tumbling in floral shower. They spring from walls in fervent handshakes, curious spirits seeking connection outside the confines of their allotted plots.

My thoughts turn to buildings, the houses I’ve passed so often over these 19 years. The dwellings that although not mine, have scribed themselves upon my soul, in heaves of ivy, smudges of charcoal. This house (below), for example with its mood of gothic mystery. Is ‘house watching’ a *thing*, I wonder. The way ‘people watching’ is?

Do others contemplate their histories, as I do?

I cannot pass it without imagining the decades of inhabitants, the hidden nooks and annexes. The Bluebeard rooms forbidden to enter. The stories blistering walls recount to eager creaking floorboards when they think no-one is looking…….The spindly rocking chairs that catch the wind when they spy their favourite raven.

How I’ve come to know the seasons of each house. Right now, the ardent song of magenta festoons the wall like the crown of a carnival queen. A little later in the season fiery Virginia Creeper will dominate, then nothing. The vacant vines will cling as claws. Fruitlessly, desperately, their quiet faith in Spring.

A little further down the hill, I pass a series of named houses, remembering the way my son, then four or five, would dutifully read and call out each one.

Failure to remember to complete this vital ritual, for him, would be cause to retrace our footsteps. How it annoyed me at the time - traipsing back up the hill to partake in the familiar recitation of ‘Brooklyn, Clareville, Stavelea…..’

Yet now, my mind is content as I hear that tiny yet authoritative voice, documenting detail, an avid collector of order in his mother’s throes of chaos.

I pause to cast my eyes across the next wall as it sprawls before me, piano keyish. Green forces itself between major and minor. Bridging awkward notes of man and nature.

I arrive in town.

This town, my home since 2005.

“Look up!”, I used to tell visitors when I worked for the ‘Tourist Information’.

I follow my own advice, my eyes perching like birds on roof tops. As they do, I spot the ferocity of deterrent pigeon spikes. Metal teeth, waiting for prey. A tool humans have deliberately deployed to keep their town sanitary, pretty, pleasing to the eye. Deserving of visitors.

How many others bother to look up these days, to contemplate both the beauty and ugliness beyond the immediacy of their own nose? The way they coexist.

Traffic lights stack as trios of lollipops, the large flattened boiled sweet circles we had as kids. Green were my favourite. The nearest I’d get to the Venetian glass I watched them make on school videos. Oh, to clamp young jaws down upon them, split that luminous moon into emerald splinters. “That goes through me. You’ll ruin your teeth” I can hear my grandma say as I crunched, treasuring her own precious pearls.

I admire the flair and stone through the grey lens of day, the tiny period features people seemed to once prize more highly, the art of a scroll or pillar. Scalloping.  The witchy imposition of wrought iron.

Sometimes, I tell myself I will read more about architecture. My knowledge is limited, but I have deliberately held myself back from learning too much, not wanting to become disappointed by reproductions and copies, frustrated by the dupes. The delight is, after all, in what we perceive, how it pleases our senses rather than satisfies the intellect. Does analysis add or detract from our appreciation of what we experience?

I probably do the same with people, too.

I say telepathically to the pigeons, who seem oblivious to the spikes meant for them.

But you have to keep some seeds of sunshine inside, in order to appreciate an increasingly overcast world, don’t you?

They coo and eye me, tilting their heads.

I board the bus. The world both behind and in front of me.

July lied.

This, is where truth lives.