SOUP AND SEAGLASS
I have just hung up the washing; it feels good to be able to get all the clothes outside in this gap between the rain clouds. The ground is sopping, the water sits in not quite puddles in the garden but the sun is shining very strongly; so strongly that I cannot see the screen at which I type. Although I am in shirt sleeves, I am sweating a bit; wishing I was in shorts and a t-shirt.
I bought clothes pegs of the old sort not long ago; just split pieces of wood. They do not work. In fact, as I hung the clothes, the pegs kept on falling, landing, with a slightly wet thunk, onto the ground. When I tried to fasten them, they only worked with a certain width of cloth. I imagine I could end up on a search for the perfect clothes peg but never find it because I always buy the very cheap ones.
When I went into the kitchen, I turned off the oven and had a quick look at the tomatoes, peppers and garlic baking in there; waiting to be turned into soup. It is a great feeling; preparing tomatoes with a sharp knife, the quarters falling away red, glistening, fresh, the peppers getting sliced into pieces, their white pith and seeds being discarded, piled into the compost bin alongside the tomato stalks. The garlic cloves getting crushed with the back of my knife but still, even though it is easier to remove their skins; that frail whiteness; I still find those paper skins sticking to me. The kitchen now smells good; the tomatoes are slightly shrunken, the peppers a touch blackened. I need to whizz everything together but do not know If I can be bothered to just now.
There is just the faintest sound of the tree top leaves across the road and the occasional double flap of a woodpigeon taking flight. Sometimes the throaty roar of some sort of car, trying to be ultra car like, but more often they are just a dull background hum.
I just felt a tickle on my ear, scratched it and the squashed corpse of a fly fell onto my key board from my fingers. For it a calamity and for me no more than a passing interest; strange that sort of thing.
The rest of the day has been spent walking around Ardmore; searching for sea glass. In the first ten minutes my boots sank through the green covering of seaweed and were covered with muddy water that seeped into my socks.
Wendy was silly; I was taciturn, but cheered up, I liked holding her arm when she felt unsteady on the slippery boulders. I liked sitting on the special sea glass beach; sifting through the pebbles, looking for the right bits of glass. It was good to find the molten glass with rusted iron poking through it; the red nails swollen by the sea, the old paint brushes somehow looking slightly grotesque, like some sort of feathery, dead sea creature.
I took photo’s: lichen on quartz, daisies, peacock butterflies, Wendy lying on the beach with stones all balanced on her face, Wendy’s tower of stones and the best bits of sea glass.
We ambled; hearing the seabirds, seeing so many different sorts of bee. I didn’t know they were so varied! Sinking into bits of muddy path, eating ripe brambles from the bushes besides us, sniffing roses, staring at the sea. Sometimes holding hands, getting hot in the sun, looking at all this lush greenery; all these flowers.
We failed to find any drift wood to bring back to the garden, and haven’t done much since then.
(Photo: Ardmore 2022. The trees across the road 2022)
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