July 2023 No.fifty6 News: Commemorations, Harvest Time, Personal Pilgrimages.
Posted on 31st July 2023 by Julie and David Thomson in General News.
July - Mid-point of the year so it is appropriate we looked back and forward this month. The weather has been a real mixed bag, commemorations kept us busy, farmers kept busy harvesting, wonderful guests, and as always things keeping us busy but happy at No.fifty6.
The iconic day of 1st July brought rain, and while there have been lovely summer days, it feels like there has been more rain than an average July. While most of southern Europe has had a devastating heatwave, our temperatures have been normal, and we are thankful for that. It seemed only yesterday the fields were bare brown earth, then verdant growth like the Somme was coated in a green banket, but the farmers began harvesting the wheat from mid July – Le Moisson – The Harvest. All around us the fields are golden with wheat stalks, the precious grain collected by the harvesters, much needed to feed this war-torn world. The stalks are rolled into bales and soon the cycle of ploughing and reseeding the next crop will begin. The cycle of life in the fields which saw so much death and destruction continues.
Of course, each day in July we can’t help but think of each day being another marking the Battle of The Somme. The headstones mark the days like a calendar, with no July day being exempt from commemorating someone’s loved one. So on July 4th we thought about Alan Seeger. His poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death”, is one which resonates so clearly in July.
