table, beech, minimal

Light, shade and leaves. Composition on a table outside a pub.

Unlike most of the trees in The Grove, a beech which I pass this morning still retains many of its leaves. As I examine it, I remember how when I was a child my mother used to make arrangements of beech in the Autumn. I see again for a moment the hallway in our house in Forest Row, not so far from Tunbridge Wells. I see it again now, 72 years on, beside the telephone, a tall vase of beech sprays, golden brown, crisp and slightly crinkled. They smell of the onset  of decay. To keep the leaves longer attached, my Mother would add glycerin to the water in the vase.

The  need for simplicity, reduces everything to a circle, the circle to a dot, and the dot to nothing.