Return To The Olive Farm by Carol Drinkwater

Author:Carol Drinkwater [Drinkwater, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Autobiography, Memoir
Publisher: CB Creative Books
Published: 2013-04-15T23:00:00+00:00

6

We had taken our time deciding whether or not to fell the survivor of our revered pair of cherry trees. The first had died over a year before. We had missed it greatly for it had been the snowy-white shade in spring, leafy-green parasol of summer and umbrella in winter to our deceased dogs, whose discreet resting place we had created about its feet and where, even as I looked upon the patch now, I could see the settling hump of earth that blanketed our darling Cleo.

I remembered how hard it had been to face the fact that this exquisite tree, not just any nameless tree, had died and needed to be removed; that it, along with the animals it had sheltered, had reached its end. This pair of fruiting cherries was one of the surprises, discoveries, we had come across on the land after we had completed our first major clearance of the hillside. There they were, ligneous pillars of beauty and bountifulness, suddenly revealed in all their glory. Both produced the finest, burgundy-black cherries which, when you bit into them, bled a sticky, wine-tinted juice. In place of the first lost fruiter, I had introduced two small ones. Now, the second of the original venerables was following in his companion’s footsteps. Early spring was all about us. The red squirrels were reappearing. The sun was rising higher in the sky each day and everything else had burst into life, but this had remained the same: a dark post of wood with three tall fingers, just as it was when we had cut it back the autumn before. Lifeless, and we all of us agreed that the moment for its felling had finally, inevitably, come.

The men performed the deed and once this formidable fruit-bearer was down and sawn into hefty logs, we found that beneath the coating of bark, which fragmented at our touch, the once sturdy trunk was fretted and alive. Streaming rivers of enormous black ants inhabited networks of tunnels. Ascending from its root system, they had hollowed out the tree’s inner timbers and made their nests in a complex display of corridors, passageways, galleries. Entire communities were running frantically, at a loss to understand what had happened to their fine wooden home. I refused to spray them but feared they might take up residence in neighbouring trees – had they been responsible for the demise of these two fruiters? – so we decided to burn the cherry wood immediately, piling up a monumental bonfire. We brought chairs, cups of green tea, dragged some of the slender, withering lengths of striplings and root shoots from the pruned olives and sat together in the late afternoon watching the gradual disappearance of a being that had given us such a spread of beauty in its annual flowerings followed by its exquisite fruits. This was its final burst of light.

Quashia hinted that if I had agreed to spray it, this cremation might have been averted. I ignored his judgements and sat silently listening to its aerated timber crackle and pop.

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