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Note From a Smaller Island: The Tree
The summer routine was always the same; eight weeks on the Island of Bute. A certain tree was always the first place I ventured whilst my mother unpacked and prepared the dusty, damp living spaces that reeked of libraries past combined with mushrooms.
The ash tree was in a woodland area where newfound friends and I would gravitate to; this was our joy, the temporary transformation to the feral from creatures formerly held in suburban captivity.
In spaces between its large, knotted, and knurled veins protruding from the earth like aged arthritic fingers, we would sit round the velvety moss carpet between. We sat with our peers and unprohibited and beyond the gaze of adults.
We boys, intrigued by the petty whispers and giggles from the girls, climbed the trees, displaying our mating feathers in acts of bravery and daring. Then, we would while away the hours watching and talking as the lazy sun scattered diamonds on Loch Ascog’s smooth surface as it dipped over the horizon.
At the same time, observing the farmhand in the distance gathering the hay. I breathed in the evening sweet grass fused with dung, a welcome odour. Eventually, we would return to our homes when our stomachs or weariness overpowered. I would sit in the deck chair listening to the pneumatic, rhythmic hiss of milking machinery relieving the bovines of their day's takings.
Jim, 1970
Postscript 2023
Five decades on, I often return to that tree, reminiscing on the memories we have shared under its foliage as its ‘very being has become entwined with mine in an unlikely kinship.