Low moon

I seek for charms that autumn best can yield
In mellowing wood & time bleaching field
John Clare


The sky is purpling as the light fades. There's a snell wind, but the days are still full of sunlight - dawn to dusk.

It's that sunlight that these trees have been storing, summer following spring, year on year, decades at a time. From the size I'd say fifty years of stored energy giving bursts to growth of limb and leaf, holding back some for those bitter winters that are written through their trunks in concentric circles.

Just now, birch and pine, they're felled, split and stacked in the sauna woodshed. Twelve feet long of a stack, six feet up and six feet across.

There's a melancholy in the air today. Folk are silent, a little withdrawn. There's sunlight in plenty, but there's also that wind, blowing from the east and hopping straight over autumn to speak of winter.

I've missed the sauna time and it's late but I mooch dragging my toes over there anyway and at midnight find it still hot. I have it all to myself. There's a greeting from the pine logs and the birch logs throwing their lives of digested sunlight outwards from the stove. I sit on the pine bench and breathe. Simply breathe. My gratitude is to the split logs and Simo the log splitter and to the trees that gave up their stores of energy for this moment.

The axe sits behind the splitting block just outside where I'm suspiring now, rather than breathing. It's a fine tool, with a curve to it that brings to mind those axes carved onto Pictish stones in Scotland; a collar grips the shaft which curves as gracefully as a young birch.

I throw a ladle of water onto the hot stones and a wave of scorched air, seconds in coming, hits the throat and nose first making breathing a searing awareness. I taste the salt of my own lips and at the same time the resinous smell of pine burning is brought to my nostrils straight after the heat.

I'd twisted a calf muscle, but it's uncramping; even my hard-working liver, often a weight on me, seems to relax.
The heat becomes too much, but on my way out I throw on a couple more splits of pine which crackle into flame at once. I cool off in the open porch. I'll not use the dipping pond, it's rank green with duckweed. Just steam in the midnight black.

Distant planets are caught up in the branches of the pines. There's a lowing from the cattle in the one cleared field among the trees down by the bay.

I steam-roast and cool off a few more times, the time in the heat shorter and the cooling longer, until finally the high moon beckons. A dark shadow, stepping delicately through crisp undergrowth, slips among the larch trees over by. The pine and spruce cones are hard underfoot, but the grass is cool and sweeping heels and toes as I walk towel-wrapped, barefoot home.

The living trees softly rolling in the wind, might with me, be recollecting their dead.