Storytelling

These clusters of berries look horribly toxic.  Beware!

The pin oak leaf I found on my walk this morning was  astoundingly big - much bigger than the apple that I found to compare it to. Anyway... Yesterday we all worked to make a gigantic leaf pile. Leaves were piled in the wagon and hauled from all over. They were swept up from everywhere. The heap was so big you could get lost in it. Afterwards we drew pictures. Henry drew a worm. Then several worms - in fact a whole family of them... The smell of the leaves, the crunchiness of them, the scatchy little bits of them that get inside your clothes. I think as we get older we forget some of this until we revisit it again through our children and their children.
When I was a child we lived in Essex in England in a gamekeeper's cottage on the Thorndon Hall estate - a rather magical setting for a splendidly dull middle-class childhood where I spent my whole time longing for something to happen. Much later on, when we were living in Morocco and England seemed very far away, I wrote a memoir of my leaf-scuffing, magic-seeking self in which all the stuff that I wanted to happen  did happen. But quite a lot of it is about Guy Fawkes and making miniature gardens on trays and brothers who are bothersome... It was published as a book  - Jane in Winter - here but is now available on Kindle Direct where you can read the first pages free. I'm working on a summer story now but it's progressing rather slowly.