Sometimes, you’ve just got to let go.
*
If I stay low, I should be fine. Hug the ground, become an outcrop, present no perpendicularity to the howling winds and in this way maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to get on with what needs doing without being swept off my feet and hurled unceremoniously against a wall, or a fence, or picked up like Susan’s enormous trampoline, toyed with in mid air, and dumped in a crumpled heap a hundred yards away*. It’s not cold, or wet, just boisterous in the extreme, so this seems like a plan worth clinging on to.
Of course, I ignore it immediately. Not out of bravado, or recklessness but because, though I can hear the tempest battering the house and whipping the trees around in a kind of frenzied torment, through some accident of weather or topography or, perhaps most likely, hedging, all the action seems to be happening Up There, several feet above my head, leaving things strangely peaceful at ground level. Most odd.
And let’s be honest. I’m not tall, I’m stocky (I may or may not have furry feet and a fondness for five square meals a day and snoozing) and, if anything’s going to be picked up by the wind and forcibly relocated, it’s probably not going to be me. Not until a lot of other things have been picked up first, anyway.
So I’m safe to work out here for a couple of hours before the sun sets, introducing small pockets of order into the gleeful tangle of growth otherwise known as my garden. This goes against the grain for someone who prefers to leave as much of their own garden as possible clothed in nature’s glorious complexity, but there are a few practical considerations which call for unhindered access – to the soil, for one, as the postman continues to bring me spring bulbs, and it’s tricky to plant through a tangle. To shed #1, for another, which finally has enough space cleared all around to allow for its removal.
And all the while I work, the wind is frantically ripping leaves from trees, as if wary of a contractual penalty clause that would be triggered should work continue into winter. Just less than a week, then, to persuade each deciduous twig to leave hold of its precious cargo. Not that the twig needs much persuading. By now, the twig has almost certainly done with the leaf, the end of a beautiful relationship where the twig would offer the leaf a home, and a drink, and the leaf would reciprocate with the sugar it made all summer long by bashing electrons off water molecules in the presence of carbon dioxide and sunlight. But there’s not much sunlight around at this end of the year, and the twig and the branch on which it sits, and the trunk or stem that supports the branch, have sucked the last of the sugary goodness from the leaf, and channelled it into cells where it will be jealously guarded all winter long, until the energy it contains can be made use of come spring. And so the leaf, now surplus to requirements, is being let go, and if the wind doesn’t get it today, than gravity will tomorrow, or the day after – it’s not you, it’s me, it’s us, it’s just not working out any more, I just need some time to get my head straight, but I don’t want to hold you back.... Go. You should go.
I don’t think the leaf minds in the least. The signs have been there for weeks now, maybe longer. First the water got shut off, then it was all one way traffic with the sugar, all take, no give. And then the door started to close, and seal up – which was a cheek, cos as if she’d have wanted back in at this point – but that’s the way that trees and shrubs do this, it’s not like she didn’t know, hadn’t been told, and really, it’s for the better. And all that’s left to do now is to let go, and allow herself to be carried to new places, for a new purpose, a transformational role with like minded friends who can really do some good, you know? Get down and dirty and grow things from the ground up, nurturing startups, feeding into new initiatives, giving their all to build something better, the next time around. It’s really going to turn out for the best, after all.
Abscission, it’s called. This moment – the actual moment where the tree lets go of the leaf (from the Latin ‘ab’ (away) and scindere (to cut), the latter familiar to anyone who’s heard of a pair of scissors) – ripples right through autumn, though fall is surely a more appropriate word for the season in this context, its natural wisdom gently calling us to follow suit. It’s time, the trees say, to let go of what’s no longer working for you, to repurpose what’s left over and get ready to start over again. But first, a little rest.
*This actually happened. Though, it must be said, Susan did live in quite a windy spot, on an exposed hillside facing the North Downs. Not being myself the biggest fan of free-standing trampolines in gardens, the only shame about the whole affair for me was that the hideous apparatus survived its short, undignified flight with minimal damage.
Abscission is such a great word and one new to me so I am most grateful. 'Five square meals a day and snoozing' is a fine recipe for winter