Three attempts:
Garden furniture
Garden furniture comes in all shapes and sizes, like people.
Some of it is very permanent, made of heavy wood and unmoving, screwed deep into
the ground. Other items are light and temporary, like deckchairs which threaten
to buckle under your weight. It can be fun to bring the inside of home into the
new space of the garden, to get ants onto a nice rug, drop an ice-cream on a
dining room chair that has been liberated onto the patio for an afternoon.
Does garden furniture secretly wish to be inside at night, once
the sun has gone down and the family are safely ensconced into duvets and
bedrooms where large wardrobes watch over them? Does garden furniture look
around in the silent midnight hum of the garden and see insects and rodents and
next-doors cat on the prowl and secretly wish it were a faithful chest of draws
made of mahogany and holding a collection of miss-matched socks and baby photo’s?
Does the smell of soil and feline defecation get too much? Or is
it happy to just be there for us on the four sunny days of the year when the
rain holds off for just long enough so the family come together in the open
air and stretch out on those trusty, slightly rusty, red deckchairs?
Eagles
Eagles frighten me. These aren’t
sweet little birds that pop into the back garden for a bite of a worm basking
itself in the sunshine, they are predatory, large and magnificent. The wing
span of an eagle is truly terrifying – larger than a paraglider I’d imagine. Eagles
soar in the air with a freedom that captures the imagination – especially that
of the American people who supplant it into their national consciousness to
represent strength and individualism. Eagles peer down from cliff-top roosts
watching us tiny mortals; the size of ants. I wonder if they judge us, mock us
with a dismissive flutter of feathers, if they playact ‘human’ to each other, smiling
beaky disdain for Hank in his black SUV on a boiling day in the Canyons,
listening to soft rock on his radio and wearing a baseball cap to cover his ever
expanding bald patch – with a large eagle symbol emblazoned proudly upon it.
Fireworks
Fireworks remind me of the autumn
– the smell of gunpowder and bonfires and the old ‘remember, remember’ rhyme.
Do I remember my first firework show? There was a festival once where everyone stood
around, freezing in the crisp early evening, waiting with a tired anticipation. The
crowd was hushed, occasionally giving over into excited bursts of hysteria from
children. The music looped to the greatest hits of Queen, everyone drinking a beer and buzzing with the celebratory
feel to the air.
The moment the first one fizzes into the sky you
are struck by several conflicting emotions: anticipation of the ‘big one’ the
moment when a ten tonne firework will wreck the sky with its flaming aura; fear
of the din of noise that is about to assault your senses; the sense of
preserving your cool (you won’t ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ with the masses, it takes more
than a firework to make you smile!). But, then before you know it you are swept
away with the music and the spectacle before you, all of that beauty and terror merge
into a feeling of elation. You experience a feeling of lifting up, of letting
go, of your body exploding into the sky.
© CT, 2012.
No comments:
Post a Comment