The fuchsia had grown so far over the path I’d been stepping sideways past it since August, which tells you everything you need to know about how the summer went.
I’d meant to cut it back in June. Then July came, and there were people in for three nights who needed the towels changed and the sitting room aired, and then Bríd came down for a long weekend and we walked out to Brandon Creek and back the long way and drank too much wine on the Friday, and somehow it was September and the fuchsia was practically touching the clothesline. When I finally went out this morning with the secateurs and the old pair of gloves – the ones with the hole in the right index finger – I felt something close to relief. Just to be doing it.
Garlic in October is an argument with May.
The apple tree gave well this year. Better than last, when we had the wet July and half the fruit bruised on the branch before it was ready. This year I’ve had proper apples: green-yellow, tart, a bit lopsided, the kind that would embarrass a supermarket. I’ve been eating them standing up in the garden for the past two weeks, which is the correct way to eat an apple from your own tree. I brought a bag to Maeve on Saturday and she said they’d be great for a tart, and I said I hadn’t got round to pastry yet, and she said she hadn’t either and we stood in front of the post office agreeing about pastry for longer than was strictly necessary.
Tom came by late morning with Bess running ahead of him. He’d seen me from the lane and just raised a hand as he passed – he doesn’t stop unless you’ve stopped first, which suits both of us. Bess came through the gap in the bottom of the stone wall anyway, had a thorough look around the vegetable patch, found nothing of interest, and trotted back out again. The vegetable patch is fairly well exhausted at this point: a few straggly kale plants that I’ll leave in for another month, the last of the climbing beans gone woody on the cane. The whole bed is more or less asking me to put it to bed for winter.
So I did, or I started to. I’d bought a bag of garlic bulbs from the shop in Castlegregory last week. I kept meaning to order them online and then not doing it, and then when I was in there getting the messages I saw them beside the till and thought, right, fine. Breaking apart bulbs of garlic to plant is one of those small jobs that looks fiddly and turns out to be satisfying in a way that’s almost out of proportion. You just press each clove into the earth, pointed end up, about a hand’s width apart, and in May – in May, which feels completely abstract from here – they’ll be ready. I planted two full bulbs’ worth and then stood looking at the patch trying to decide if that was enough and deciding it probably was.
I thought about snowdrops too. There’s a bare corner beside the stone wall where the light doesn’t reach until midday, and it occurred to me that it’s exactly where snowdrops would be left to their own devices. I haven’t done it yet. I have a packet of bulbs inside on the kitchen windowsill and they’ve been there since last week, which is not quite the same as planting them, but it means I’m thinking about it seriously. Probably tomorrow. Possibly the week after.
The light, though. I want to say something about the light because it was extraordinary today in the way it gets in early October, low and pale and coming in sideways across the back garden so that everything had a long shadow at eleven in the morning. The stone wall looked like it had been lit from inside. The remaining kale had gone this deep blue-green that it only goes in the cold. Even the compost bin looked considered, which is not something I ever expected to think. I was out there for two and a half hours and by the time I came in my hands were cold through the gloves and there were bits of fuchsia everywhere and the path was clear.
I washed my hands at the kitchen sink and stood looking out at the garden for a while before I put the kettle on. It looked tidier. The apple tree was still there with a few last fruits I haven’t picked. The bag of fuchsia cuttings needed to go to the compost. The garlic was already invisible, which is how it’s supposed to be.
I’ve always liked finishing something I should have started three months ago. There’s a particular quality to the satisfaction – sheepish and genuine at once, amn’t I the great woman altogether, getting to it in October rather than March, nearly. I stood in the kitchen and had my tea and the garden was there through the glass and the light was doing what it does this time of year.
The garlic will come up in May whether I think about it or not.