The day goes on as it begins: a wet flannel across the face that smells of mould, a mizzle, violet tinged, December’s dimmer-switch stuck on three, from what might have been dawn to what might become dusk. Beautiful.
Looming from this foggy myopia is a tree. It is a field maple, Acer campestre, ancient, with a great knot of roots that shows how the field has eroded from weather and sheep scraping a shelter or seeking sanctuary. The root-knot, of Medusa’s petrified snakes, supports a single straight trunk, clear for about 6ft, then opening into an irregular-shaped canopy 20ft tall and almost as wide. The butter-yellow, five-lobed maple leaves have fallen and its winter nakedness is an intricate tracery of twigs bearing brown buds, raindrops and vivid daubs of lichen. It is a small tree compared with the ash and oaks, but probably older than them.
This field maple is solitary, enigmatic, magnetic and sheltering. There’s something odd about its position in relation to earthworks under the sod that may belong to a field system from its monastic past or earlier. Nothing in this light gives away its age, identity or place, nothing feels tethered to this strangely floating land. A swan periscopes above pool reeds, redwings speak scratchily in an old ash, and in the hedge along the lane the brambling are restless. These birds burst from the kale patch like a feathered cannonball, spread into hazels, regroup in high trees, then dive back into the field when they’ve forgotten what it was that spooked them.
But even the hair-trigger paranoia of the brambling is muted in this delicious murk. The feeling is that things are going on that the physical senses can’t detect, mysterious things. I received a Christmas card with a quote from Richard Wagamese’s novel Medicine Walk: “I sorta think you gotta let a mystery be a mystery for it to give you anything.” At 3.30pm, jackdaws start gathering to roost. In these solstice days of the guttering year, winter trees give off their own, beautiful mystery.
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