Yuletide

Last night I dreamt of my garden. It was winter & I was surrounded by fresh greens: cabbages & lettuce, the name lollo rosso rolling around my mind. An anxiety dream in response to plague island border closures & speculative veg shortages on the face of things, or the body's call for something to mitigate the onslaught of mince pies, but I woke feeling deeply comforted. A glut of lush winter greens is not the current state of things in my actual garden, but I am meanwhile bolstered by the farmers’ shops and market, and I suppose I know that it could be. Next winter could see this dream come true, in the new veg beds we built this year in this garden, itself many years dreamings finally come into being.

It is Yule. A year we have been here. What a blessing. Not perhaps the one we dreamed of at the beginning of this year, but the searing blessing of seeing clearly, knowing the truth of things. A blessing often mixed; any horrors we dream into being now we do consciously, in the broad daylight of knowledge and understanding.

From garden books I have read I imagine winter to be my garden's dreaming, a state of dormant slumber beneath a sparkling icy blanket when little shows itself above the surface of earth too hard to work. In an imagined life of seasonal attunement I too would rest, burdens laid down until the season turned again. This is not my experience. Mud, slime, rot beneath leaden skies, a husband keeping a hospital department running, young children requiring constant care. Sometimes I am too beaten down by it all to look, but when I brace my exhausted self against the cold and raise my weary eyes I find much that is still, is already growing. Winter in the garden a liminal place, a state of in-between. Much like a dream. 

I am tired. What a dream it would be to rest until the first signs of spring. I take my cue from the garden, die back where I can, keep growing where I must. I love my dreams of the garden - it grows within me now, shows itself even when I am not in it. There is such comfort in being so rooted. I wonder if the garden dreams now of me.