The song of the skylark is waning. Those trickles of summer through the grasses, the bright yellow patches of common bird’s-foot trefoil, have almost gone. It is a moment of pause between the seasons.
There is a pervading stillness to this stretch of grassland, just a small distance from the heave of the waves beyond the dunes. For months, it has been a hub for the skylarks’ surging music. Their sound has matched the swash of the waves, so that to move through it was to be soaked in song. Now, I see only one. A flash of white from its tail, a streak of brown as it shoots up, fixes for a moment, rapid wings trembling. Mute, it moves into the mist.
Sylvia Plath called it the “odd uneven time”, and there is a brief deflation, a sense of being left behind while others continue in their own rhythms. I search, still, for the slippered sunlight of bird’s-foot trefoil petals but find it dimmed: here and there, a ray, no more sudden splashes. It is a plant with many common names, with eggs and bacon, and butter and eggs, among a number that refer to its yolk-yellow flowers, while the less salubrious “Granny’s toenails” points towards the seed pods (likewise, the more tactful “bird’s-foot”). These varied names suggest a long history of noticing these showy, sunny flowers.
Now, I watch for what is taking their place. Soft water mint pushes up its pom-pom blooms, cheering the ground with pink and lilac. These shades deepen into clusters of wild thyme and selfheal. Just as I am adjusting to the purple palette, a red and black six-spot burnet moth flits in, fanning bold wings above the flowers. As a caterpillar, it may have fed on the bird’s-foot trefoil that is now on its way out. There is a fluid rotation to this moment, where I have only scratched the surface. Before the curlew’s call takes over from the skylark and autumn’s waterlogged ground makes the late summer flowers seem like a drowned dream, I pause, too. There is so much to attend to.
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