But for the Nettles

by Marshall Moore

I’m on my way to the supermarket because I needed to leave the house, not because I’ve run out of anything important. A public footpath just around the corner offers a shortcut to the village center. The wooden fence along one side is overgrown with blackberry brambles. Birds have not stripped the vines bare of fruit yet. I’m mildly surprised. The end of the path closest to my home is more manicured, a hedgerow which in spring is exuberant with flowers. The primroses bloom first, yellow ones followed by pink. As the season progresses, these give way to foxglove, columbines, nasturtiums, and daisies. I suspect local residents planted some of these. At ground level, grasses sway. The word elegancy comes to mind when I think of the slender grace of the seedheads. That needless but decorative final syllable speaks to the way they nod in Cornwall’s constant wind, elongating the elegance. I can identify common sorrel, campion, and various ferns poking through the ivy that scrambles up the slope of the hedgerow. Common sorrel has blade-shaped leaves like elongated hearts. I’ve cooked with it once, a thick sauce we glopped over salmon fillets. Zingy, citric, cloying—I wanted to like it much more than I did. It overpowered the fish. At the far end of the footpath, the ivy gives way to a green reef of nettles. According to someone I’d like to forget, these are signs of ancient settlement. They thrive in nitrogen-rich soil, leftover from human and animal waste. Not to put too fine a point on it, our shit outlasts our civilizations.

The young couple next door drove me out of the house this evening. In their semi-regular screaming fights, she does all the actual screaming: she screams and pounds on the front door when he locks her out, screams when he relents and lets her back in, and screams as she—from the thumps—throws furniture at him. I think she must be very strong. The screaming can die down for a few hours and blaze back up just when the tension has left my jaws and my shoulders. You’re scaring me right now, I heard him tell her last time. During that one, my cat looked anxious, clearly not liking the noise either. I’ve considered confronting them. The walls are thin, after all. I decided against it, though.

Americans come to England expecting the whole country to be like London: all understated grandeur, and the tube to get around. For those lucky enough to get out of the cities, a vast green countryside awaits, but villages like Threemilestone escape our national gaze. Suburbs are easy to bash: there’s no there here, nothing ineffable, no reason to visit. The silences here can be suffocating, and other parts of Cornwall clamor louder for attention. Half an hour down the A39, Falmouth boasts good beaches, a castle, a subtropical microclimate, and a seedy history as an entrepôt for the Packet Service. St Ives, Padstow, and Newquay are overrun in summer. Much closer to home, Truro has a cathedral and sloping streets of handsome Georgian townhouses. It has arcades and cobblestone streets and cute shops; it reminds you of one of London’s better districts if you squint. But Threemilestone exists because it grew up around a mile marker precisely three miles from Truro’s city center. Apart from the remains of some World War I trenches—this part of Cornwall served as a staging point for Allied troops and was at risk of being bombed flat—there is nothing else of historic interest. I duck under low branches of a buddleia tree, heavy with panicles of purple flowers. Some asshole has chucked an empty can of lager into the tall grass. I’d fish it out and throw it away but for the nettles.

I arrived in England’s Florida after twelve years in Hong Kong. Located just south of the Tropic of Cancer, Hong Kong does have seasons, albeit not ones new arrivals are likely to recognize. Winters are mild, with temperatures rarely dropping below 10 degrees celsius (50 fahrenheit). Spring comes, less a renewal of hope than a sense of oncoming dread. Banks of clouds cover the sky and condensation runs in rivulets down tile walls. Everything gets sopping wet and filthy. Locals warn against eating sushi or salads when it’s like that. Germs are thought to thrive. The arrival of summer turns the city into a furnace. In that climate, you don’t interact with nature, you avoid it. The parks contain too much cement and the sidewalks have fences, so you shelter indoors, in the air conditioning. Autumn brings respite from the fearsome heat and the mugginess. You can go out without melting. You can look forward to winter: slightly chilly; clear and bright; survivable.

Cornwall couldn’t be more different from Hong Kong. There aren’t seasons so much as gradations of rain and wind. Hail can fall from a clear blue sky. Now and then it gets warm. The man I’m trying to forget liked to forage—not a thing I’d have done in Hong Kong because of the pollution. Heavy metals in the soil, that kind of thing. Sometimes I went with him. We helped ourselves to wild garlic earlier in the season. It grows rampant in several spots near his house, the leaves growing broader and deeper green as they mature into March and April. By May, the stuff is too coarse to eat; by June, all you see are sad clumps of dying leaves and the last straggling white flowers losing their petals. A couple of weeks before we transited from present tense to the past, we waited for low tide, drove down to Devoran, put on our wellies, and tramped around a muddy estuary foraging samphire, then stopped by Waitrose on the way home to see how much the stuff would have cost had we bought it there. We also picked up some monkfish. It was our last good day.

I turn left at the end of the footpath. Tall privet hedges shield the little houses on the other side. These are mostly what the Brits call semi-detached and the Americans call duplexes. All but a few have façades of drab beige pebbledash; the rest are red brick. Spiderwebs frost the hedges. In the years I’ve been here, these shrubs have grown a couple of feet taller. When I moved here four years ago, I could see over them. Now I can’t. The houses suggest holiday occupation but the cars in the driveways are the modest kind pensioners drive, older Peugeots, Vauxhalls, Ford hatchbacks. Several gardens offer rhapsodies of color: roses, fuchsias, geraniums, begonias, anemones. There are hydrangeas the purplish color we like to round up and call blue. Some are pink, but in a strained way that suggests dark roots under peroxided hair. Bees drone around dense lavender shrubs. Five or six cats roam, quarrel, and take up positions of wary surveillance under cars and on steps. People retire here, die in armchairs, and their kids sell the houses after clearing them of everything but the ghosts and the outdated cabinetry.

When I look back before crossing the road, a vista opens up. The hedges give way to open space, and the low east-west ridge Threemilestone is built upon offers views out over the valleys to the north and south. Think of a green quilt with squares sewn together by hedgerows. These are farms, smallholdings. To the north, a whole new town is being built, a new bedroom community Truro urgently needs. Much of this, I believe, is a floodplain. In the city center, the trees and the houses are taller. Here at the edge of this little conurbation with its bungalows spread over low, treeless hills, the open sky and relative flatness remind me of eastern North Carolina’s inland coast, where I grew up. The Atlantic is much closer here, just half an hour north of here and half an hour south. This is the tip of a narrow peninsula, or at least the frenulum.

Cornwall is having another cloudy, chilly summer. I take care to remain quietly thankful for that. I have friends who crave vitamin D. The rain and mild temperatures have been a boon for unruly plant life: crowds of dandelion stalks a foot high or more bobble on every lawn. The grass has taken on a weird tangled lushness. Strimmers struggle. On this walk from nowhere much to nowhere much, I notice there’s less blue in the sky now. An enormitude of dark grey clouds bears down, front-running sunset. Just off to the west, these will bring the rain the Met Office has been warning us about. Their forecasts have been wrong all summer, though—or is it that Cornwall is too unpredictable? I’ll be lucky to get home dry. Despite the weather alert, I didn’t bring an umbrella.

The yellow umbrella is Hong Kong’s national flower, or it would be if umbrellas were flowers and Hong Kong were a nation. I was in at least ten of those massive protest marches you might have seen on TV. In reality, the HKSAR’s official flower is the bauhinia, a graceful tree with pink, orchid-like blossoms. There’s very little land in the urban districts, so everything’s vertical. It’s as dense as this grass. Also, with the city’s history of catastrophic landslides, there’s a civic mandate for restraint. Unstable hillsides have been paved. Trees are aggressively pruned lest typhoon winds send limbs flying. Flowers don’t bloom there so much as gasp in their planters until the next time the rain hammers down. Outside the urban center, the place is a jungle, green and teeming. There are cobras. Life exists in a state of tension between order and unruliness, chaos and control. It was home.

I want to be unkind. I want to ask why my neighbor thinks she knows what devastation is, why she resorts to these banshee theatrics. I want to ask if she has ever lived in a conflict zone whose horrors the world erases by calling them riots, ever moved to another country alone during a pandemic and arrived just as another round of lockdowns begins, ever had to leave a spouse and cat behind with no clear idea of when they will rejoin her. Has she ever spoken to journalists about atrocities happening right down the street? Or been teargassed, and had to worry about traipsing dioxins in from all the spent gas residue blanketing the city? And then there was the crushing, annihilating loneliness of that first year. I took this same walk again and again as that summer gave way to an awful fall and the nights drew in, the sky that deep hydrangea blue by four, full dark half an hour later. A couple of months after moving into this house, I walked up to the supermarket for a few unnecessary necessities—again, not because the fridge was empty but because I was losing my mind—and the cashier asked if I was okay. I mumbled yes, unsure how I sounded through my mask. I’ve wondered since then how my eyes looked that night. I’ve learned things I never wanted to know about loss and despair. And there’s a point at which the screaming needs to stop, isn’t there? My own muffled howling lasted almost a year. But I will say none of this to her. She’s half my age. I’m not a monster.

Predictably, it’s raining when I walk home. First, there’s the mizzle, a Devon and Cornwall term for this mixture of drizzle and mist. It sounds like a portmanteau but is thought to be of Low German or Dutch origin. I dart across the small roundabout in front of the convenience store, pass the pharmacy and the Chinese takeaway, pause just long enough to check prices in the butcher shop window. A mistake. Startled by the sudden downpour, I bang my knee against a brick planter that overflows with lavender. It thrives here but I’ve never been able to keep it alive. I hobble home, my shopping bag bouncing against my good knee, my jeans and baseball cap already soaked through. The bruise will be the color of hydrangea blooms.

By the time I’ve put away the groceries, taken a quick shower, fed the cat, and put on fresh clothes, the sun has set. Light tends to linger in late summer, but the heavy clouds have blocked it. My home office faces west. On wet, blustery nights like this, the streetlight down the block shines down in the shape of a rough right triangle, the long side parallel to the pole and the short one an indistinct axis above the pavement. I switch off the lamps in my office to see better. The shouting next door has died down. Perhaps they’re mesmerized too, staring out at this swirling yellowish vortex of rain and wind. Or perhaps I’m the only person who’s noticed it. I’ve been shattered by my recent past before: sobbing, hiding my head under the pillows, pacing the floors, drinking too much, waking up dry-mouthed on the sofa to that “Are you still watching?” prompt from Netflix. That was Year One here: the aftermath, the pandemic. So much death. On stormy nights I would look out this window in horror, as if nature itself was mocking my isolation with these otherworldly fractals, these strange oscillations. I’ve grown to love it, though: it’s surreal, evanescent, oddly beautiful. I don’t know the screaming girl’s story, and I don’t want to. My own recent stories haven’t ended that well. I’d rather let the comfort of small inevitabilities do its work. Grief ends the same way the seasons do, its absence noticed mostly in retrospect. In time, the rain will let up. The days will shorten and grow long again. The nettles will die back and lose their sting.

BIO: Marshall Moore is an American author, academic, and recovering publisher who lives on the South Coast of England. He is the author of a number of books, the most recent of which is an essay collection titled Sunset House (Rebel Satori Press, 2024). His short fiction and essays have been published in The Southern Review, X-R-A-Y, Eclectica, Pithead Chapel, Trampset, and many other fine places. He holds a PhD in creative writing from Aberystwyth University. Socials: linktr.ee/marshallsmoore