Metamorphoses

[steepholm]

Today, to assuage my melancholy or perhaps to indulge it, I took a slight detour on the way home from my mother's house in order to visit the wood in Otterbourne where we scattered my father's ashes in 2005. The land belongs to the Woodland Trust, and when he died I gave them some money in his memory - enough to care for an acre there in perpetuity. I'd not been for couple of years, though, and never in May. It's a pleasant spot, where the blackbird's song mingles with the not-so-distant rumble of the M3, and where Charlotte Yonge no doubt walked arm in arm with John Keble many and many a day. (Now they lie in neighbourly repose in nearby Otterbourne churchyard.)

Anyway, when I found the right glade I discovered - much to my surprise - that my father had turned into a bluebell wood!

And they say I've changed.

Comments

[kalypso]

You could write a riff on Full Fathom Five. Were his eyes blue?

[steepholm]

As a matter of fact they were - a startling speedwell bluebell blue!

[kalypso]

Well, there you are! A pity "Those are bluebells that were his eyes" doesn't quite scan. Bulbs, perhaps?

[steepholm]

I don't know, that sounds more like Webster, somehow - seeing the bulb below the topsoil...

[kalypso]

I hesitated over it, but it makes a sort of sense. Could just go for "flowers", swallowed into a single syllable? And there are bells in the original, though the ding-dong sort.

[steepholm]

Yes, flowers works much better, I think!