Season Cycle

Spring: Lindisfarne

October 22nd 1997. It is dusk. The sky is a fine and transparent grey-blue, darkening as I write. House and street lights grow brighter, Natone Hill looms large, its skyline an army of dark, tossing gums which I remember from childhood (I think there was one which resembled a penguin, but it may have burned down years ago.)

Exactly one year ago, watching from this window I wrote my first and only haiku (something about October rain on pink flowers.) Then as now, the garden outside was filled with new life. In the dying light there is a solitary bumblebee - huge and ponderous, like a hairy barrage balloon tethered to the shrubbery. Beside the paling fence over which my elderly neighbour observes me is a big bush of frivolous-looking cream pom-poms. In the gloom they have taken on a sickly greenish caste. Closer again, the thick, glossy-leafed fig tree, which the blackbirds and starlings vandalise, and a sprawling explosion of musky olive-green fuzz which grew from a cutting from my old garden at Fern Tree.

And now it is dark. I pull the curtains and only this room remains.

This is a relatively famous room. I�ve been interviewed here twice. There is stuff strewn about, which is how it should be; many records and books and things. On the dark green, aging and crumb-spotted carpet, a receipt confirming I will be in northern Ontario for christmas, freezing. I am very insular, and only leave the room to go overseas.

There are many plush animals in here. Visitors get submerged by their soft bodies. The wolves have a riveting yellow gaze, and I arrange them so they glare out the window at my neighbour. But now the curtains are drawn and the plush wolves all gaze inwards.

While I have contemplated skies and the moon, here inside my mouth on the retromolar pad a lesion has developed; a problem of the squamous cells. It is whitish and somewhat shiny, with a fissure or pit at its centre which tends to burn, as if acid were slowly eating away at the flesh. It doesn�t not to wish to respond to this strange gel I�ve been given, and so a biopsy is in order. I don�t know what to think; this is a strange time.

Outside in the darkness the lawn is getting longer.
The spring growth is here.

1997, Tim Gadd