First frosts

First frosts have finished off the dahlias this week and an extraordinary feast of mixed-wood colours are floating and fluttering through the Cumbrian air everywhere, like enthusiastically thrown confetti at a well-loved couple’s well-attended wedding.

That the proud dahlias should come to such a mushy end is truly and annually a sad affair, as is the departure of the house-martins beckoned by South African sunshine. But it’s also true that the morning’s cold and twinkling decoration makes for café coffees, hot chocolates, log stove fires, deeply vivifying lakeland cycling, and unmatched clearing of the air.

And all of the above fuels my day-dreams about the eternal round: as flowers and leaves return now to their source, so in a little space they’ll rise up again in glory, sage, seasonal, smiling, sustained and sustaining, from their now frosted, then fed and fertilized, warmed and watered ground.