Memory of trees

We woke up this morning to the ghastly racket of several chainsaws howling away at the back of the house.

The council were cutting down trees in the Library Gardens.

We knew they were going to do this, because they had roped off part of the car park so that everybody had to come to work early to find parking spaces in the road, and Mark thought last night that they would be felling today.

I felt terribly regretful about this. The trees in question were not exactly lovely, they were giant Leylandii: but they were absolutely massive and have been there for longer than my life. It seemed like a dreadfully sad thing to happen.

Mark said pragmatically that their roots had been starting to tear up the car park. He put his boots on and went over to ask the man with the chainsaw if we could buy the felled timber from them for firewood.

The man agreed cheerfully, and even offered to haul it across to the farm for him, so Mark took his own chainsaw and disappeared for the day to do firewood things.

I did not go with him. The man made a log pile on the field at the end of the drive which will still be ours to use even when the farm is sold, and Mark spent the day stacking and organising the logs and sawing up dry firewood in the shed.

The new logs won’t be any good to us this winter, of course, because they will need to be cut and split and then stacked to dry for a year, but they will do next year, and maybe even some of the year after.

I left him to get on with it and did tidy home things, like dusting and pegging washing out. It has been a beautifully mild, gentle September day, still and with a faint drift of mist in the air. The washing didn’t get dry, obviously, but it acquired a nice garden smell, of mint and fennel and cut grass.

I thought that this was nearly as good and I hung it all up on the rack before I went to work so that it would get actually dry, and just hoped that it wouldn’t start to smell of dog instead.

It was absolutely splendid. It is the first time in ages that I have been able to do home jobs in a comfortable, leisurely way, instead of racing about trying to squeeze washing up between going to the farm and going to work. It was a lovely peaceful feeling, unhurried and calm, and I pottered about in the watery sunshine, breathing in the autumn smell and thinking about Mark bringing home the winter’s firewood, and feeling contented.

The lodger had a day off today, so in between hoovering and posting forgotten things to the children at school, I had the occasional chance to sit down and drink coffee with her and explain to her how she ought to be living her life. She listened patiently for a while, until in the end I got distracted by something else and she hastily booked herself into an hotel for the night.

This was probably not really because she was fed up of listening to me being helpful, or maybe not entirely because of it anyway. She went to stay in an hotel because of a steaming hot tub in a dog-free garden, an enormous sofa, a glass of champagne at bedtime, and a bed that somebody else would make in the morning. I approved of this wholeheartedly. I might live in the Midland in Manchester if I didn’t like our house and garden and camper van so much.

I was having such a contented time in the sunshine that I was pleased to notice that I wasn’t in the least envious, and waved her off happily.

The house smelled of the rose water I had used to iron the sheets, and the garden smell clung to the washing, and the hearth smelled of cut firewood and woodsmoke. When I went to the post office I realised that the whole village smelled of the freshly sawn timber, and I breathed it all in and thought how lovely this time of year is.

It is my favourite time of year.

Apart from my other favourite times of year, obviously.