Among the Trees

I went for a walk the other evening which took me to the edge of my late stepfather David's old farm, to the plantation which we always thought of as 'David's plantation', because he and his father planted it. By the time I came to know him – over thirty years ago, now – the trees had grown to be quite tall. Both his and my mother's ashes were scattered not far away from there.

It's years since I wandered through it: it's all fenced off and the wrought iron gate that used to open into it is now inaccessible and overgrown. I had to find another way in. I found a sturdy piece of fence by the beck which flows through it, climbed it, forded the beck and climbed up the far bank, up among the trees. At that end the trees are all ash: David and his father had planted them with a view to harvesting them for timber. They're all still there though: they've outlived them both and they're now at least twice the size as I remember them. I made my way among them, through the undergrowth. Looking around, I was seized by a strange feeling. It's one I've felt before, several times, since my stepfather died. In the past, it was a fleeting feeling that took me by surprise when I was out in the fields, if I came across a hole in the hedge fixed with old pieces of wood, or, sometimes, a ruin of a dry-stone barn. I could never find the right words for it and I still can't. The strange ways of the subconscious. When it came over me in the plantation that evening, though, it was anything but fleeting: it was with me all the time, confirming my suspicion that it always was about David and about loss – and not only about David, but also the passing of an era in my life.