Finding Space

My mind feels as if it is in a spin cycle lately and instead of finding the motion of it I seem to be in some sort of paralysis, frustration is running deep.

I have so many things to do and yet I leave the house and yesterdays dishes to venture into the garden with my paints. A fine rain has set in and my mood takes over, usually I enjoy it but today nothing can seem to lift me. I haul up in a broken down greenhouse barely large enough to sit in, rest my back against a bag of compost I could not afford and angle myself so that I avoid most of the rain that comes through a broken pane above me. I look about for inspiration and at the bird table that stands in the garden. To to the right of it stands a stunted edible cherry tree my grandad gave me back when he could walk and when I thought things would never change. Each year it becomes more and more fragile winds have broken it, flies have stuck to it like glue, blackbirds have stripped it from every hard lime green fruit before the ripening ever began and even a rogue trampoline caught in storm Barbara or Gertrude, whoever it was they took the heart out of it. I say on the telephone ‘Grandad you’ll never guess what’s happened to your tree this time’ and he says ‘That maid and that tree’ but he never seems surprised. To the right of the table are some plastic pots I think my mum bought in the 90’s that were given to me when I moved into my first house they are home to herbs I want to plant out but know in reality I never will. Behind them a perennial kale that I have loved since purchasing it as a mere stick a few years ago. Right now the cabbage white caterpillars are feasting on it, turning it into a baron wasteland of veins and stalks in a matter of days, but it always comes back.

A wood pigeon has squeezed himself onto the table, to do so he has to fly from the cherry in an attempted hover maneuver before tucking in and under in a less than graceful landing. He pecks constantly at what is left, his serpentine rimmed eye ever watchful, there are sparrowhawks on the wing. His stormy grey feathers dark under the shadow of the table and his beak tap, tap at the wood. I decide to paint him because there is not much choice at this awkward angle. It is not until later, when I come to write this that I realise that the pigeon and I were both just trying to fit into a space whilst searching for sustenance, the pigeon via foraging for flecks of dusty corn and myself via watching him do so.