Mid-Winter

June glooms towards its end – cloudy today. The sunshine is about average, rainfall is well down, chill is higher than usual. Still the solstice is passed. I intended to write about it but Mum’s death cut across that intent. To me that day is a high event – the sun reverses track and starts returning south.

In the Northern Hemisphere winter solstice is close to New Year’s Day. In the English winter of 1865 Thomas Hardy wrote ‘to insects the twelvemonth has been an epoch; to leaves a life; to tweeting birds a generation; to man a year.’

Cousin Marlene has sent me a copy of a Boxing Day 1948 picture. There is Mum’s mother holding my two-month old half-brother Bruce surrounded by her thirteen other grandchildren. There would be three more, seventeen in total. Sixty-one years ago! The generations come and go.

My study window looks out to a mid-winter scene. In the foreground is a camellia covered with buds. Shortly it will be ablaze with scarlet blooms. Beyond the mock orange blossom hedge that separates us from our northern neighbours is the largest koroniko I’ve ever seen, covered in seedheads. Beside is the gaunt architecture of a weeping elm, bare of leaves. There is a tree fern. And coming over from our west neighbours is an oak bough with a few brown leaves still hanging on. All winter they’ve been floating past.