Another one bites the dust

The daily school run takes me along beautiful roads.  There’s a place where the winter sun hovers behind the trees showing them in all their skeletal glory, sometimes through mist, sometimes frosted, sometimes with the sun so bright the trees are burned on your retina.  There’s a place where on sunny days the light flashes so fast through the trees you fear you’ll develop epilepsy.  The scenery is spectacular.  But the most dramatic bit of the drive is around a double bend above a steep, steep hill.  On aerial maps the tree line along the road and the shadow it casts on the fields below look almost like a river.  They’ve even had to cut and paste the map to show it all in focus.  (Oriana begs to home the long way just so she can squeal at the rollercoaster feeling of dropping down the hill.)   And just today I thought I should stop every day, and photograph the view.  Sometimes I drive the road in thick fog and can see nothing, sometimes in bright sunshine and the fog sits below obscuring the view, on some days you seem to see nothing but the army camp below and on others it’s the yellowy orange stone of the village below that catches the eye.  Always beautiful, always different.

Then I came home and realised that it’s a pipe dream.  We always start to get ready on time in the morning.  We are always late.  A forgotten packed lunch, a shoe lace untied, a lost reading book, unbrushed hair… there’s always something. Could I possible remember to throw a camera into the mix?  Every day?  And if I did, would I remember to stop?

Over the last two days an ash in the corner of our garden has been coming down.  It was one of the trees targeted for immediate attention by Tim the tree guy before we bought the house.  As permission to fell trees in a conservation area takes a while, we agreed that Norman’s estate would pay for the work, but that we would not delay the sale waiting for it to be done.  The chestnut was able to come down sooner as it was short enough not to require planning permission.  The others did.

First down is the ash.

The ash is in the furthest corner of the orchard and leans at 45 degrees over the fence, like it never wanted to be in our garden at all.  To get to it you must climb through a reclining holly and over branches I couldn’t identify but think is hazel before crossing the smallest stream to the very edge of our property.  Not an easy place to photograph.  Not an appealing photograph.

And now it’s gone, and I’ve made no record.  The whole corner has been transformed.  To get to the tree, to take equipment close, to get passed the holly, to avoid the tree bringing down other trees or at least splitting their branches, to protect the fence, a clearout was needed.

It looks quite different.  The corner has been opened up.  We don’t have to clamber to the stream, should we want to go there at all – it’s more of a drain that a burbling brook.  We can see the neigbhour’s house.  Oh, I know it will all grow over in a matter of days, but right now it seems so different.  And, of course, there’s no tree there.

It took two days to take the tree down and has been booked for weeks.  I had all that time to make my photographic record and I remembered too late.  What on earth made me think I could manage a daily record of anything, let alone a view on the school run?

But hey, we have a lot of firewood.