I’m in the garden. It’s six twenty in the morning. I’m with my zinnias. This early morning writing thing has been going on since at least the 12^th August. I’ve written every day. I’m fed up with it. I’m not sure why I’m fed up with it, or what I was hoping to achieve. So I’ve come out here to sit with my zinnias. I’ve never grown zinnias before, though I have known for a very long time that I wanted to grow zinnias. I don’t know exactly why I have wanted to grow zinnias, although now I have done it I can see exactly why I would have wanted to. Though I did not know this before. They have a papery perfection. They have a wonderful pastel colour palette. They fade and change and all the while they remain magnificent. Their central cones grow and have perfect yellow crowns. Some of them have double flowers, almost like dahlias (but better). Some are semi-double and many are single plates of petals. One or two have flourishes of petals emerging from the central cone. I took the first set of pictures of them on the 10th of August so for as long as I have been writing this daily mourning, they have been glowing in my darkness. Now that I have grown them I cannot imagine I will ever not grow them. I will carefully save the seed when the time comes, and next year I will grow them again. I will grow more. I will grow as many as I can, and I will plant them near places where I sit in the garden and I will love and admire them every day. I will grow extra so I can give them away so others can get this glow that I feel when I look at them.

I’m sitting here watching them rock gently in the breeze. It is not a glorious morning. It has been raining. There is a grey shroud of cloud filling the sky. It is neither cold nor warm. A wood pigeon is sitting on the aerial on the house next door. Two jackdaws pass and somewhere a crow caws. I’m looking at the zinnias, looking for the answer to a question I can’t quite form, and then I see some little petalettes emerging from the cone of one of the red ones and somehow that is an answer.

But, but… So many buts. Nothing changes. Just stay. Just be. Pick herbs, make tea. It’s the same each day and that’s ok. Cook food, weed the garden, take photos, watch the birds. Write if you must, it’s all the same.

The zinnias rock gently in the breeze. Time to make the tea.