grimmutterings

As is often with small communities or villages or clumps of houses, there is a focal point. Commonly it is the ale house, although for some it could be the church or the post office, for others a park or a pond, somewhere wives met to gossip, children played, dogs paid homage and lives met and diverged.  For Here it was just a fork in the dusty road. An oak tree stood once at the fork in the road, but after enduring a century of lightning strikes during summer storms, one night some years ago, the scorched and dying tree had fallen and blocked one side of the road.  The residents of Here had turned up the following morning, the men and some of the heftier women brought their axes and set to work chopping up the oak tree and clearing the road. Others brought hand saws and carts, and by nightfall everyone in Here had enough firewood stacked by their fireplaces in their homes and in their sheds outside for the winter and longer.

The fork in the road though seemed to have lost its purpose without the oak tree and people didn’t stop to talk any more, the children seemed sullen and not as playful and even the dogs slunk around, hackles raised and lips curled. Here had become a grim place to spend any time. Word spread, as it tends to, and people stopped passing through Here on their way to There.  The fishmonger didn’t show up at the fork in the road like he had done for years, and the milkman never arrived, the baker hadn’t been seen for weeks. The women of Here waited at the fork in the road for many days before giving into cold and hunger and returning home empty handed to hungry families. 

There was always the poacher with his supply of fish and birds and rabbits, he would feed Here. The poacher didn’t come to the fork in the road either.  After some weeks of living off canned and preserved foods in their pantries, the residents of Here were rapidly facing starvation and it seemed nobody would be coming to help.  Instead of giving up, Here rallied round and plans were made, old dusty books were read, and lessons learned, knives were sharpened, blades honed, parts oiled, cobwebs dusted. By early Spring, Here was a hive of activity and by Summer, Here was showing signs of significant change.  

The following year, Here was another place altogether.  Vegetable gardens had been planted behind once dingy but now sparkling whitewashed cottages, where peas, carrots, onions, potatoes, corn, beans, cauliflowers, and marrows grew lustrously.  Herbs, both for cooking and medicinal use, had been planted along and amongst the vegetables, and in the hot summer afternoons Here was an aromatic delight.  Lavender now edged once grubby pathways and climbing roses trembled delicately over doorways and trellises. The children caught trout in the cold, clear river and stocked the newly dug breeding ponds. Others collected the abundance of berries for making pies and cordials or collected seeds and wildflowers in the hedgerows for propagating gardens.  Wild rabbits, pheasant and grouse had been caught and were breeding a constant supply of fresh meat and eggs.  Cows again grazed in the once overgrown and idle pastures, and Here had a daily supply of milk and butter and cream and the much requested blackberry ice cream in the summer months.  Hives of bees produced a delicately rose flavored honey from the hives by the climbing roses, a lavender honey from the hives by the lavender plants and the bees in the hives by the lemon and orange trees produced a citrus honey that no one could remember tasting the like of.  A once lost recipe for mead along with the clear river water, the lavender, lemons and oranges and the different flavored honeys, produced bottles of golden liquid that spun with rainbows in the sunshine.

Bread rolls and loaves and fancy plaits were baked daily in some homes, other homes made meat pies or fruit pies and cakes.  All was shared with all, and on the week’s end, the men of Here roasted rabbits and game birds on spits over the fires they made at the fork in the road.  Everyone in Here brought chairs and tables and carried baskets of pies, or bread or fruit or vegetables to the feast, and with the lavender cider or the honey mead, Here celebrated the week’s end well into the night.  Here had almost been lost but had prevailed and done so most marvelously.

Come one week’s end the fires hadn’t been lit for the feast and people were arriving with their food and families.  The men stood in a group around something long and black lying in the road, something no one seemed to know what to do with or where it had come from. The women held their excited children back in case the thing in the road was dangerous and the dogs poked hesitant noses at it and barked nervously.  Here stood and looked and whispered to each other until an old grandfather made his way through the crowd to the thing in the road. He kicked it with his boot and there were hisses of fear and caution from behind him.  He took his walking stick and hit the thing in the road and there were gasps from the crowd.  The old man and the group of men spoke in whispers and after a while reached an agreement and while the rest of Here watched, they lifted the thing in the road upright and moved it to where the oak tree once stood.  A shovel was shouted for and duly produced, a hole was dug and the bottom of the thing in the road was planted in the hole and the earth stamped hard around it.  The rest of the thing with its two branches that dipped and curled on either side stood upright pointing to the sky.  It was a subdued affair this week’s end with most of Here nervously watching the thing standing tall and dark and alone where the oak had once been.  Later when darkness fell, lanterns were fetched and the fork in the road shone with little lights and echoed with laughter and music and forgotten fears.  The thing that had been in the road stood alone at the edge of the lights.

Towards the end of summer when the evenings were getting darker earlier and earlier, at the week’s end feast a child took her lantern and whispered to her father and pointed at the thing that had once been in the road and now stood where the oak tree had been.  Her father, slightly drunk on honey mead, took his child’s lantern and hung it off one of the thing’s two branches.  The light glowed over the fork in the road and the residents of Here.  After that, Here always hung two lit lanterns when it fell dark from the thing’s two branches.  It did its job most wonderfully.  It was, after all, a lamppost.

Later, as in keeping with the darker side of the uses of a lamppost, Here hung the fishmonger, the milkman, the baker, and the poacher by their respective necks until they were dead.  Here feasted and danced and toasted their week’s end and their retribution with a new recipe of honeyed trout mead in the golden pool of light cast by the lanterns on the lamppost at the fork in the dusty road.