Summer Came and Went.

I was sauntering up the gently sloping lane known as The Hollow this afternoon, meandering between the puddles as a light rain fell unremitting and unhindered by the skeletal trees lining the top of the embankment. I was musing on the past year which began with an alarming show of blood last November and continued through examinations, procedures, four spells in hospital, and the currently ongoing recuperation. An oft-used phrase suddenly occurred to me: ‘The summer came and went.’

It’s such a seemingly innocuous little phrase, and yet it carries such profound and poignant intimations of time and passage. I think of how we wonder at the miracle of birth, while simultaneously reflecting on the fact that birth is just the first step on the road to death. I look at the creek in my fairy glen, currently in heavy spate, and remember last summer’s arid time when gardeners and farmers alike prayed for rain. I think of times past generally, and wonder whether the past is more real than the future, or whether it’s the other way round, or whether there is only the apparently non-existent present because the process of flow never stops. I think of all the people I’ve known in my life who are now dead, and wonder whether I shall be the next to reach my personal terminus. I think of the importance we attach to the ways of the world, and how we celebrate strength, conquest, success, high achievement, influence, acquisition, and even the righting of wrongs. And I wonder how much any of it really matters.

It has been rightly pointed out that the paths of glory lead but to the grave, and Shakespeare was wont to remind us that the worms which eat the bodies make no distinction between high and low status. But then we have to consider what, if anything, lies beyond the grave. The religionists tell us their certainties, the atheists hide behind the lack of evidence, while the philosophers ramble and wrangle interminably. In fact, nobody knows.

Last summer was, for me, a time of unfamiliar weakness when the watchword was caution. It came and went and now I feel almost back to normal. But for how long and does it matter? And does it also matter that the woman who has been the major occupier of my thoughts and recipient of my affections for so long might actually be no more real than I am? It might or it might not. I know nothing of the reason for being here, and neither does anybody else.