While Samhain has most sensible folk curling up with a pumpkin and a horror movie or doing dark magicks, we who 'grub around in the mud' - as our appalled Virgo city boy neighbour would have it - have a special mission. For the end of October is the time to prepare next year's potato ground and as everyone knows, potatoes are Pluto ruled, as are leeks which follow potatoes into that still warm, unmade bed as soon as they're harvested. So, having a freshly dug plot our thoughts turn to compost. Later there will be trips to the farmyard for the other Pluto ruled stuff but the 'fertiliser du jour' is seaweed which usually rolls in on a south easterly swell around now.
There's a stiff breeze off the Bay and it's spitting with rain. Against a deep pewter sky, feeling the pressure drop in their barometric bones, three rooks burst skyward from the thicket of dark pines behind the railway lines as if thrown up by an invisible juggler, over and over. Luminous pale gold reed beds almost conceal the grey heron and dabchicks break the silver surface of marsh pools. The spring tide is flowing and frisky and yes, rolling dark with weed. Along the strand line goodly little heaps of seafresh weed, like a fabric market for rockpools, rusty wracks and leathery kelps, sea lettuce, delicate, emerald goodness and little red coral weed, thong weed, wireweed, bladdered and forked and iodine, wet weed .
Bending our backs to the task, we fill sack after sack, dragging heavy bags up the beach as the racing tide swirls foaming around them. In days gone by horses and carts dragged tons of weed up to the surrounding fields..hard, hard work but as sustainable, natural and seasonal as the rooks dancing against the steely sky.
The tide turns, the waves now lifting the floating weed back out to sea.. The Gods give, and the Gods take away...
Bags of weed hoisted dripping and heavy into the back of the car, we walk for a bit, stretching aching muscles and breathing deeply. It's beautiful, a thin, thin line of diamond brightness defines the horizon as the clouds build and as the wind strengthens, little skittering flocks of dunlin swirl, reeling into the spray. We have the beach almost to ourselves and it's beginning to rain.
Later, the seaweed deeply spread on next years' potato patch and leek and potato soup simmering on the stove, we reflect on the fittingness of some things..
Wishing you all the fittingness of the end of one year and the beginning of another.
