Yesterday I found myself tidying our church garden, picking up the ash branches that fell on the lawns in the recent storms. They were thick and knobby like fingers and I snapped them to fit into the brown recycling bin.
At home, the birches had shed their fine twigs in the gales. They were carried on the rainwater that comes up and then soaks away from our garden and lay washed up along the edge of the lawn like flotsam and jetsam on a miniature beach.
On the wall in our dining room is an old picture that belonged to my grandparents, depicting a scene close to Roughlee. There must have been watercolours like this in many a municipal gallery. A young woman in a red blouse, black skirt, stout boots, clean but tattered pinafore is dragging a large branch down the grass and sedge of an autumnal hillside. A less distinct male figure behind her hauls an even larger fallen tree. The sky is clouded, it looks as if it will rain
Sitting before a coal fire, safe in a stout terrace, I imagined my grandparents contemplating this portrait of the romantic poverty of earlier generations, as I in turn looked eastwards down the terraced streets to the wooded slopes above the Ribble.
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