Another Year

It’s cold. All around me the world is getting ready for winter, getting ready to put itself to bed. Squirrels scramble and scamper around looking for food, raiding bird tables for fat balls and tasty morsels to see them through the leaner months. The leaves are turning yellow, russet and gold before tumbling lazily from the trees and lie in drifts as in a dragon’s hoard. Darkness comes earlier each day and the sun is tardy getting out of her chamber in the morning. Lights in windows pierce the gloom - stars in a smoggy sky, beacons calling through the lengthening night.

Skeins of geese fly honking overhead on their way to warmer climes. Children are heard laughing excitedly as they crunch through leaves, crying with delight as they unearth conkers, rich brown and shiny. The church bells clamour, calling people to harvest festivals. Birds chatter in trees and hedges as the wind sighs, roars, howls.

The first frosts come. The ground hardens beneath feet, the grass like it has been sprinkled with sugar. Breath blooms in the air as though people are steam engines puffing their way about, bustling to work, to school, to appointments and meetings. Here and there the first hats, gloves and scarves of the season can be spotted as people rush over the village green to get where they need to be. No time for standing and chatting.

The smells change. The wind is crisp and sharp. Wood-smoke hangs in the air bringing images of warmth and crackling flame. People hurry by with pumpkin-spiced lattes and gingerbread. Soon it will be Bonfire Night and the world will reek of gunpowder, hotdogs and the disappointment of damp squib displays.

It’s the changes in the earth that I notice the most. It becomes dark, dank and loamy. The worms writhe like oiled snakes as they try to turn the heavy soil. Within its bounds the stench of rot and decay, of things turned bad. Within its bounds I lie. Unloved, unmourned, unmissed. Just another anonymous face on the streets, there one day, gone the next. Nobody’s nobody. Not me for the hysteria in the papers, the posters on the street lamps.

I don’t even remember how long I’ve been here. Some of the trees were saplings when I was torn and discarded, hidden in the earth, a dark secret. The houses on the other side of the pond hadn’t been built then. Somehow, somewhere I hoped there’d be more. That they’d dig foundations and find me here, waiting. But nothing was done and nobody came. Body became bone, clothes rags, flesh dust. And so I gave up dreaming. The people pass by with me as their unseen sentinel, the animals leave my grave unmolested. The world turns and I go on waiting, watching but no longer hoping. After all, what’s another year to the unremembered dead?