As I took a drive out of the small town I had been for a year.  A place of rest, rehabilitation, care and community. Cared for – after a tricky divorce and caring, I like to think of my parents, during lockdown, in a place of high mountains and clear tumbling waters.    As I drove through the dark, rich agricultural lands of ploughed rectangular patterns carved into the gentle, folded landscape of the Perthshire hills I saw a farmer, his legs wide astride in a field.  Wellington boots embedded into the earth, solid and grounded, securing some hedging. The hedge’s neatly clipped branches unified within the row, within the many lines of boundary hedges. His curly, auburn hair, lockdown long, glinted red gold in the streak of sunlight that shone through. Doing his job, doing it well – each year and every year.  Securing, feeding, pruning and reaping; endlessly delivering without appreciation but with expectation.  

I took in the berry bushes. The multitude of lines.   Berries that in summers past, I would have rushed down so eagerly to pick, with a carefree rush of pleasure, enjoying the moment.  Delighted to gorge straight from the branch.  Delighting in the benefits of stocking up the freezer.  On the other side, flashed the long poly-tunnels and a flood of my own preconceptions from imprints of old photographs and current headlines.  Itinerant workers of old and Eastern Europeans stooping over crops, working their way down rows.  Strawberry plants sat high, I noted, off the ground to make it better: less backbreaking and quicker.  The more punnets filled, the more money. Win, win.  Life, hey, is truly cyclical: the Scots went out to Poland.  From the mid-15^th to the 17^th century, we were the workers who provided the necessities and endeavoured to fill our own pockets.

 As an innate city dweller, I plunder.  As a now country dweller, I have the abundance: dropping from the apple trees, the brambles on the riverbanks.   Yet, I don’t ALWAYS see.  It takes a refresh, a journey, a change of location, another to show ME.  The Polish young man freed from city lockdown during the summer on holiday here.  Yelped with sheer joy as he grabbed at the high fruits of a plum tree and passed them down into the folds of his wife’s skirt.  A tree set back from the roadside verge behind an old rusty wire.  Forgotten, out of bounds, for the birds, not really seen, not by me, not by others.  As he rolled the fruit in his hands, he stretched his hand out and offered his sweet nectar, ‘have’, he said.