Awareness

The Grapes of Things to Come

Thursday prompt: Write about extraordinary, mundane things that tug at your heart

I wasn’t a man who cooked so the origin of fruit pies was, I guessed, the mystery world of bakeries. Although I’d drunk sloe gin I had never made any or wondered where it came from. Until Percy took me over the hills on his back I do not think I could have named a berry to save my life.

The shape of things had been mangled that summer. At the age of 49, unemployed and suddenly single, there seemed very little to anticipate as winter approached. I moved to a small riverside town and, on a whim, took a series of horse-riding-lessons at a commercial stable in the hills.

Like many horsey sorts, the staff were tough cookies. Sometimes cheerful, more often indifferent and occasionally hostile, they were good company for a crochety urban refugee with nothing much to lose. The madness of horses overcame me and after some persuasion the boss let me work during the week at the stable yard, mucking out, tacking up, catching and feeding.

Now I could ride every day for free and most weeks I did -very happily. By the time winter was approaching I had hundreds of hours in the saddle behind me and (I suspected) thousands in front. A mile and a half up a winding road, the stable filled my waking hours. I began pairing off with a massive cob named Percy who knew everything I did not. The hills turned cold, customers thinned out and keeping the horses fit became the challenge. We would ride ten, sometimes twenty miles in the mornings, more in the afternoon if needed.

One typically windy November day six of us were out on a posse, trotting along an unfamiliar path, steam rising from the horses we had just galloped across a mile of moorland. Ahead of us I noticed a clutch of shining, brilliant red berries, then another, and realised we were entering a long stretch of holly bushes on both sides of the path. A south wind was bending branches and whistling through the leaves. We quicked into canter and for a hundred yards more we swam in a bobbing sea of violent greens and reds.

“Look at that!” I exclaimed. The girls, mainly farmers’ daughters, rolled their eyes in a collective so what? From habit I shut up -the stable-girls correctly assumed that I came from another planet- but back in the yard, unsaddling, the image of the berries was stuck in my head. That night I sat in the pub alone, re-imagining them. Why had the spectacle struck me with such force? There had been a sharp glow, a surreal brightness outlining each tiny globe, yet the bunches had seemed like individual organisms, and the long hedgerows like waves in a crackling ocean. How could I have passed nearly half a century blind to this marvel?

We rode past the holly many more times and although the sight never quite stunned me again, the memory was fixed in my mind. By Christmas week I understood how my new role at the stable, the daily trance induced by the clopping hooves, the limb-wrenching exercise, adrenalin and freezing fresh air had gradually schooled me to accept the embrace of externalities. Overwhelmed by the moment, my rag-bag of concerns had been eclipsed and I felt grateful. Some things you take from the hills and others you leave there.

The hedgerows I had been ignoring were actual universes unto themselves. Riding or walking, I learned to spot the bilberries, damsons and wimbleberries. The following year I hand-picked autumn blackberries and assembled a couple of ramshackle pies. Taunted by a multitude of sloes in a wood near the stable, I rode Percy in with a saddlebag and we emerged six pounds heavier. When I judged it to be drinkable small bottles of my first (near-lethal) sloe vodka were distributed among a carefully-chosen handful of thrill-seekers with strong-stomachs.

Percy died suddenly that winter and I was, for a time, inconsolable. But I found other horses to ride and would remain at the yard five more winters. Something in the way so many berries grow and glow in the hedges and woods still draws me out every autumn to run out the clock on the year; the puzzling synchronity of the individual among the bunch and the coming of the inevitable.

More from Solomon…