The Maroon Diaries

Upon considering my previous post, I felt that the special tree right in front of my home deserved a bit more of an introduction. I've lived so close to her for so long that she has really become a part of the household in her own right. She does protect me directly from the sun and the rain, and beyond that, I feel she has a spiritual guardianship role to this little spot. And yet I still don't know her name. I don't know the proper names of a lot of the plants up here, as they are different to the ones I know from the southern states. As for her personal name, as kind as she is to me, she hasn't chosen to share that with me yet. So she's just the Tree, with a capital letter to distinguish her from all the other trees. When I first arrived, you couldn't exactly tell there was a tree there, so much as infer its existence by the presence of branches poking out of the top of an enormous tangle of weeds. An afternoon's work and a five-foot pile of compost lat...

This is the view from the door of my new home, looking out. Yes, I know. How can I still call it my new home when I've been here more than a year and half now? But something strange is happening to my sense of time as I get older. It was when one year had passed that I got the feeling of really having arrived, of my body knowing that it doesn't live in the city any more. I feel like I'm just starting to get properly set up and organised now. It seems to me now that you have to spend a full year, a full cycle of the seasons, in a place to really know it. Maybe when I get to the second year, this won't be my 'new' home any more. The beautiful tree provides shade in the space immediately in front of the hut, a godsend on hot, sunny days. It's a real faerie tree with lots of deep, mysterious holes in its trunk wherein the otherwordly may dwell - not to mention an astonishing variety of plant and fungal life forms. And just beyond that, you'll see...