Elderberry Picking

It marks the end of
Summer; punctuates the
opening of a closing
in of Autumn, our elderberry
picking by the river...

Reluctantly awake, you urge me up early
With hot tea and the rustle of
carriers, and with secateurs and scissors
we alight into bright morning, headlines as
yet unscanned, only crisp azure, above
the terrace houses we can't afford
to buy and the flats we won't, is read...

The street quiet in bed, bar Saturday morning
cyclists, voices ringing past like
unruly children in a library,
and us over the footbridge and the river,
beneath the railway viaduct and
off the beaten tarmac track along
the old tow-path, avoiding dog crap
Scanning foliage for evidence of
our sought crop...

We'd done this for the first time
The year before, you bottling cordial
in a store - keeping us well over Winter -
little in our life seems this natural and simple,
and shaking off sleep, I'm glad to have
it - an act to tie this year to
the past in a bow of picking, the
odd rings now glinting on our fingers, the
words 'husband' and 'wife' still fresh
and strange in our mouths...

You lead me back to the spot where we
took most a year before, reassuring
there is something of constancy
that returns on the trees that edge
the golf-course, though some are
past their prime or out of reach,
there's still plenty within grasp...

A small thrill when a good batch is
in sight; I pull the stalks off
with my hands, enjoying touch
and pathetic as it seems, the
curious glances from the joggers
wondering at our half glimpsed
figures in among the nettled bank
with carriers - a strange Adam and Eve
among the leaves in trainers and tracky bums,
making me feel alive, like we have
found what they are running from,
or trying to reach, as contentedly we
breach the bank to grab for a fruit laden bow...

Although, I know some might think,
We're blinking odd, or cod new middle agers,
'getting back to nature' after some
Sunday supplement or broadcast on Radio 4
,'A Foraging We Go' but for all
that they think is that, that's where
we've got, a squashed elderberry
on my skin burst like a sweet blister
and it feels good to have the fruit come
thick and fast before the season's past...

"Can you eat them raw?" I ask envisaging
an apocalyptic blast - the end of The Road
scenario - we two surviving, with the
birds, pulling berries from the branches
just as now I survive on these few words...

With bags laden with our sweet, red caviar, we head back via the convenience store - a pack of bacon and the paper, marking the end of the brief
escape into nature.

The Arctic will be starved of ice this Winter.
But we'll have elderberry cordial and each other.