Our house(s)

This picture was taken in mid Autumn, two years ago. The house is the one we had lived in for over 30 years. It had just been sold.

I think we had already started to grieve; we were now to look for a smaller home, with a much smaller garden.

On the right, partly obscuring the bedroom window, there is a tree, a Chinese Toon. I had planted it as a young sapling, tearing it from its parent tree. And in the clay soil of St Johns, it thrived, delighting us each year as, from its bare branches it reached out its young red tendril leaves that faded into beige and then to bright green, from which it discoloured again to fall in winter, leaving just the bare branches.

Looking out to it from our bedroom window, I was moved to try to write a poem. It was that kind of tree.