At home

4^th September

Bittersweet, harebells and yarrow. By the bay in the mixed woodland there are anthills: three feet high and maybe eight feet in diameter. The ants are moving relatively slowly after a hot summer of intense activity. Cooling off a little. I feel at home here at once; with familiar friends, though I’m still jinkin, deliberately not yet visiting the little oakwood of Tammimäke.

Instead I’m mooching by the sea along the side of Mietoistenlahti, the innermost inlet of Mynälahti Bay, which leads to Saarenaukko. Unravelling place names is a difficult business. Aukko is given in my little Finnish dictionary as a gap or opening; but I’ll leave that alone until I can ask a Finn. It’s certainly an opening though, salt water inland. If I were to thread my way south-west through uncountable islands and skerries of the Åland archipelago, I’d reach the Baltic. Northwest, I’d come into the Gulf of Bothnia: but I have no boat or charts; instead I’m ambling along the shore of the bay, past the herd of Aberdeen Angus cattle and over the electric fence.

The woodland here is made up of rowan, Scots pine, spruces. Birch of course, but also alder with its feet wet as ever; the fine surprise for me is the large number of juniper trees. All these seem to be slightly rimed with salt and I can feel it on the wind. There’s a red squirrel, which I took at first to be a bracket fungus of some sort at first, looking down on me. Its tail curved along its back, calmly, unmoving, it surveys me– a curious intruder in this place.
I’ve no strong liquor yet to use the juniper berries, nor can I think how to dry them for cooking, but I can’t forbear picking these rowanberries – bright red under the thinnest of salt coatings. It’ll make fine jelly with maybe a tang of the Baltic sea to counter the sweetness of the jelly. The trees grow among lichen covered rock outcrops, spreading their limbs along contours, rooting into crannies. These are the trees I want berries from, not their more upright cousins a little inland. There’s always a more intense flavour from anything which grows in the adversity of wind and weather. I get great pleasure from the ripping sound as I comb the berry clusters on the branches through my fingers direct into my bag. I’ll come back for the juniper berries, as well as the ripe fraochan – blaeberries - fruiting from thin soil on the fringes of the bedrock.

Geese are wheeling noisily overhead in their dozens, breasting the wind a moment then beating up against it before falling to the salt marsh: a whole tribe of Daedalus folk. I come across a small boathouse or rather fishermen’s hut hard by an inlet just big enough for a half dozen boats. They all look a little neglected; the most interesting among them a wooden clinker-built snub nosed dinghy, its bright blue paint peeling, its belly full of water. From the hut hangs a plastic northern shoveller duck decoy, a summer visitor here, as well as some hoops and half hoops across which are stretched fishing nets. Here also are a couple of abandoned snow sledges, one with a fine orange painted kitchen-style wooden chair straddling the wooden braces above the runners. There’s also the usual remains of a couple of rotting wooden boats and oddly, a double seater swing in a frame. Maybe the old fishermen enjoyed a smoke after a day’s haul, swinging gently in summer breezes.

I walk back with my full bag over my shoulder along the unmetalled road. A farmer is tedding – two rows into one high windrow. The crop seems herb rich and will make fine fodder, maybe for the Angus cattle over by the bay. We wave as we pass each other. There’s some late swallows skimming as low across the cut-over meadows as the geese were high. The insects that lived in the fields they hunted are gone; just stubble. In the slanting evening sun a snake is basking on the dirt of the road. It’s probably a grass snake, though seems to have unusual colour configurations: unmarked along its rippling spine and with distinct black and white head bands. I touch it gently and suggest it moves – the tractor will soon pass this way – but it simply flickers its tongue at me. I’m persistent with my explaining tongue and right forefinger and it gives up and winds its way quickly on its scaly belly into the undergrowth at the roadside.

The ash trees hang branches heavy with seed; dust is blowing across the field after the farmer’s tedding wheels. There’s a change in the air; the gathering in of summer. Hay rich with camomile and fleabane. Bittersweet.