Gloaming

A most productive day. It was unusually dry, no overnight rain to clog the beds with mud and add inches to my height in wellies. I started by painting black the outside of the woodshed's corrugated iron in keeping with the other outbuildings. Then I moved on to building a brick base for my bins. Being brick rich, I only had to remove a pile from the shed and take them round to the front, where I had raked back the stones and made the ground flat. I'm very pleased with the result. I trimmed the hedge back a bit but there is definitely not room for all three bins, so the smaller one can have a home elsewhere in the garden. After all it is the garden refuse bin. Then I moved all the really old bricks that had sat on the path outside the shed to the inside, and swept everything clean. It all looks much better now. It's the tweaking and touching up and tidying that is so pleasing, and that makes all the difference. It's all in the detail. Then I gathered up all the rotten planks that used to form vegetable beds, all the non-biogradeable garden detritus, plus three blinds, an old printer of Kitty's, some huge cardboard boxes that I couldn't flatten, and the old postbox. Into the car they went, and off to the council tip with them. Oh, the satisfaction as I hurled the last object into a container and put the car back together again.

Back home again in the gloaming, I put the shopping into the house but couldn't resist a walk. It's a magical time, with the stars just beginning to come out, and the last few birds unable to refrain from a final song or two before bedtime. Bats swung and wheeled in the sky, and the smell of woodsmoke was in the air. The dark shape of the church loomed up behind a bank of yews, ghostly in the diminishing light but oddly friendly too. But I was wearing dark clothes and had no torch, a danger to and from the odd passing vehicle, so reluctantly I turned home. I had a last look around -  I'm so glad I had the drive done properly - and went inside. More delicious jobs await me in the garden tomorrow. Sheer bliss.