Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
But—and this is what kept my dad teaching it, and what keeps me thinking about it—some of the plants do work for what their signatures suggest. Eyebright, it turns out, has compounds that genuinely soothe inflamed eyes. Lungwort has saponins that ease respiratory irritation. The doctrine got there by the wrong route, but it got there in the end. What that says about how human knowledge accumulates, well, that’s something I might get into after a few glasses of whisky. But I think about it every time I’m cutting flowers. It would be lovely if the plants were trying to tell us something. It would be lovely if anything were trying to tell us something about anything. I could go for a fuckton of answers to my life right now, including if I will ever stop feeling like I made a mess of my life before I was thirty? Still haven’t figured out that one; yet another reason why I spontaneously re-rooted my life and ended up here, attempting to start over.
I crouch to cut a stem of meadowsweet and feel my hips inform me, again, that I will be paying for last night’s nervous-pacing-then-poor-sleeping. The portable heating pad is back at the cottage. I should have brought it but I’m too stubborn to go back for it.
I work my way up the slope.
The ground gets squelchier as I go. The grass thins, and there are patches of bog cotton in the wetter dips. I am very glad to have Effie’s wellies because by the time I’m halfway up the slope, I’m stepping in soft places that would have soaked through anything else. The boots make the most satisfying sucking sound when I lift them out of the wet ground. I’m not above the small pleasure of a really good squelch.
I glance up as the bog slopes upward toward the trees. I’m not going into the woods. I made my deal with the woods yesterday, and the deal stands. But the thicket at the edge of the woods is fair game, that low, scrubby band where the moor gives way to the trees, a couple of meters of hawthorn and stunted birch and gorse, the kind of edge habitat where interesting plants grow. Edges are where everything happens, ecologically. Two systems meeting, a third thing emerging.
The thicket runs in a rough line along the base of the woods, parallel to the road. I work my way into it, ducking under hawthorn, my braids catching on twigs and pulling a few strands loose. The light in here is different—dappled, even with the overcast—and a few degrees colder. The air smells of wet leaf and earth and the green astringent smell of crushed ferns. Somewhere up the road I can hear the faint baa of a sheep, distantly. The world is very quiet and cocooning.
I find what I am looking for almost immediately: a patch of lady’s mantle holding water in its pleated leaves the way it always does. There’s also a clump of wood sorrel underneath the hawthorn, the small, three-lobed leaves like clover, the white flowers veined in pink. Oxalis acetosella. My dad used to crush a leaf and have me chew it: tart, lemony, faintly metallic. That, he’d say, is the taste of every wood in Britain.
I pick a leaf but don’t chew it. Instead, I press it into the basket between two stems of meadowsweet to flatten it later.
I move further into the thicket, past dark purple and blue foxgloves that are persistent despite the approaching autumn. The basket is filling up nicely. I’m thinking I might have enough for the day’s pressings already, that I can pack up and head back to the cottage for the heating pad and a pot of tea, when I hear water.
Not the loch. The loch is below and behind me. This is closer. A small running sound, ahead and slightly to the left.
I push through a stand of hawthorn, sweater snagging, and there it is, a small burn a couple of feet wide, running down from the woods and across the boundary between the thicket and the open slope. It’s dark with peat and moves quickly. It looks like it can’t be more than a foot deep, but it’s deeper than it looks because I know the hard way that the peat hides the bottom.
I stand at its edge, basket on my arm, looking at it.
A wave of unease runs over me.
I don’t know why, exactly. The burn is small and pleasantly babbling. I have crossed a hundred streams like this in my life. But standing here with my basket full of flowers and my oversized boots and the morning around me, I have the distinct sense that I shouldn’t cross it (which is silly).
Actually no, I know why I have that feeling. The drowned women in the pub story. I’m thinking about them now, even though I told myself I wouldn’t. They wait at the edge of the water at dusk. They pull the swimmers down. Don’t go in the loch alone.