King Badger
I’ve just received news that King Badger has died.
He went down and he stayed down this time.
He was a wily old thing, gruff and determined as any of them. His only persistence, the repeated ‘beautiful isn’t it?’ as our ramshackle clan walked the many ups and downs of his beloved Cornwall.
Badgers forage alone – they don’t share food as other social animals do. King Badger foraged for 10L bottles of coke along our path and sweet treats of various kinds.
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The sycamore is a sea of leaves on our lawn, I’m going down to its edge.
The sycamore is a sea of grief – cut adrift from its mother trunk, its leaves so soon to twist and crisp in the august sun.
I was down there when it first rolled in – all fresh green and a spray of insects – those knowing leaves orientated as a complex communal offering to the day as if they were tree bound, sun bound – bound together with lignin, light, bark and hyphae.
But this optimistic attitude can’t last
The sycamore is losing its bounce.
It’s the morning now and I need to go look
I can glimpse the tired tide through the pine and goldenrod, past the teasel – it’s there under the tulip tree.
But King Badger has died in the night and I’m sad to see someone else dying, to see someone else cut down.
The sycamore is a sea of leaves but its paler now – those fragile undersides now upside down, the bouncing green, that living sheen and shine of its tree tied leaves is fading.
King Badger knew things about birds and flowers and gulls and paths. He cared about these externalities – the wild world, less so the community of his own body. A ramshackle being of belly, boots, and bags, and hogger of maps - he’d sometimes trip and fall along that path, refuse our help, struggle up and carry on.
King Badger died away from his sett, sure some of his clan were there – but he was so very inside
So very separate from his wild world.
Inside a body that slowly let him down.
Inside the confusion of his mind.
Inside a building of stilled air, corralled light and synthetic scents.
King Badger tripped and fell, but not on the path, not in the field where he would have loved to lay – for skylarks and gulls to hover and whirl over his head, for vetch, ivy and scabious to cushion his shambolic body.
He fell inside
With no soft earth to catch him.
The sea of sycamore is there on our lawn in sight of the mother tree.
She can see what we have done.
The tide is much diminished.
He has carried the piles of branches and laid them back under the tree in a synthetic leaf drop
I touch her trunk – she is human-climbable now.
Our boy is growing fast and his longing for a climbable tree did not match her tree-time, her grow-time, her life-time.
Nonetheless she is a lifeline.
She couldn’t grow with him – or ahead of him.
But she could hold him in other ways.
Her gifts were only breath and shade.