The Summerhouse

This octagonal mesh of iron and glass…

The door and lower panes of this place are painted with a climbing rose - all greens and reds, thorns and leaves and flowers.

I turn the handle…and step inside.

I hang my dripping sunhat by the door.

In here, the air smells of turned earth and rosewater, incense and candlewax and sweet, ripe fruit.

The door swings shut behind me.

A rattle of metal and glass…

The summerhouse is filled with little terracotta pots and small, chipped teacups that have been set to catch the rain that falls in fat and noisy drops. Shelves of pressed flowers and tiny seedlings. Candles and lavender. Strings of beads and shells and mirrorglass. The floor scattered with a thousand hand-sewn cushions.

On a wicker table, a basket brims with strawberries, beside an open book of poetry (left half-remembered and momentarily unattended) and a cup of hot, black tea steaming thoughtfully into the storm-chilled air.

The rain rattles on the glass. Lightning illuminates the clouds and makes them look like a smoke-painted stained glass window that's been rendered on the sky…

A couch or divan hidden beneath a thousand cushions rests lazily beside the table. Still shivering and soaked, I lie down. I wrap myself in patchwork quilts and doze among the drying flowers until I too am dry and tender once again.

When I wake, the day has long since faded. With the waning of the sky, this place has filled itself with a different sort of light. A thousand candles drip their wax onto the table and the floor. Their flames unashamedly naked, or enfolded in lanterns made of painted glass, they paint the room in a honeyed wash of warmth and changing colour. On the shelf, a jar of captured fireflies shifts and glows with living light.

The summerhouse casts its stained glass light into the gardens, calling ethereal, fluttering ghost moths towards it as the rain gives way to clear-crystal night: the high, dark clouds crossing the starscape far, far above my small, glass house.

An owl hoots in the valley. The garden is filled with the song of nightjars and crickets.

The nighttime smells of lavender and honey…

The feather-down around me is soft and warm and comforting. The garden shifts and shapes itself around me like a quilt.

I smile.

I am home.