Late winter chill creeps through sugar crusted leaves and ice rhimed puddles. The crisp air snaps at ear lobes and bare cheeks. A powerful thump of wings interrupts the melodious Dunnocks. Sparrowhawk escapes, silent evasion, the life extinguished small brown job neatly bundled and held between yolk tinted talons. The winter thrushes still cluster across the bald trees, and dance through frosted fields, their quickstep runs between the long shadows and bright disguise their constant vigilance. A flourish of whirling wings and they’re away to chatter watchfully from the high branches.
It’s been a while. For a variety of reasons. One day I might explain.
The calender hangs, it’s last leaf drooped in the pale December light. Blackbird stands and flies, silent, from stark hedge to stark black hedge. Further in a thousand rooks or a thousand crows line the electricity wires like withered fruits of a drained year. The crisp draught blue tapped for pure, longing, daze, is a welcome tonic driven through the grey spells. Hammered thin, the tail end of the year where the cold wind slices away at pale skin and dark thought, and the long dark night closes in, draped across hunched shoulders, chapped lips and chilled fingers.
Pewter November, tarnished, lurking among skeletal trees, mud, glowering skies, merciless scooping flight of the sparrowhawk scouring the unwitting and unwilling, drip, drip, dripping and always falling, failed cold, mud, rain, incessant staccato on the window panes and ledges, early dark, brief blue, trampled colours mashed in to grey, grey failing light, overcast overcome, mourning autumn afterglow caught in low sun, memories of misty fruitfulness forgotten, rotten and washed in to dank, dirt, mud, rainbow sheen on sour puddles, chattering winter thrushes pillage a feast of keys, and haws, bounty brought down, squirrel drey, grey, etched branches swaying against maudlin skies, watery sun sags in to Mars-lit gloaming, days end, slumped against December’s doors.
Fat bellied and slow, the pigeons swirl and flurry like the falling leaves under a crow laden, crow leaden sky. Autumn leaves, turning sour; ash yellow, blackthorn pink and maple rust. Chattering their song of arctic summers, the winter thrushes drift through, filling the hedges and swaying trees with plump high spirits.
The trees are pulled down around me tight as a hood, as the drizzle turns to rain floating in bands across the wheat. The willows and alder shiver, whispering in the sudden breeze. Close against the brook my seat, a bald concrete monolith dumped here by recent civilisation, retains the last of the spring warmth. Quickly the rain moves on, and the gnats return to their delicate dance in the shifting light above the water. Behind me, the brook runs over pebbles, a gentle babbling sound which seeps through the campion and cow parsley. Clacking and crackling through the trees and scrub, blackbirds pursue each other asserting their claims.
Hidden away at the bottom of the fields a sanctuary of sorts, my special place isn’t a secret, but even if you found it, it would be a different place to the one I find. So follow the path down through the old meadows, cross the little bridge and follow the headland round. Behind the nettles and beneath the gently knocking branches, I fold up my worries and set them sailing away down the brook to drift like fragile paper boats amongst the fallen catkins and swirling leaves.
My next visit, and the evening’s cool with a golden light cast long and low across the fields, as I make my way down to the brook. One of those evenings where the day’s heat sits in small pools across the path, a brief encounter as I step through them. I push between the nettles and cow parsley; my rough concrete block (if I am the only one to sit here, can I lay claim to it?) lays half submerged in the green, a manmade whale coming up for air. As I resume my perch on the sloping face a chiffchaff’s call starts from the top of the willows on the opposite bank. Somewhere off there’s a woodpecker, its gilded laughter compressing space. Sat low, the swaying wildflowers are at eye height, a constant traffic of insects; bees and hoverflies taking their summer bounty. Stuck to my clothes and up close, the delicate flowers of the goosegrass sit as tiny white star bursts among the shades of green which drift around me.
Impatient at my tardiness, the dog stops his investigations in the wheat crop and pushing through the weeds, descends to the brook to paw at the shallow water beneath the shimmering crowds of gnats. The sunlight drips between the branches, casting the water the colour of syrup as it tinkles and trickles over the slick pebbles. The clap of a crow’s wings above brings me back to the now; rearranged thoughts packed carefully away in my mind. The gentle sounds of the woods and water, a salve to calm the buzz of the day.
Early evening, and the dusk slides through the woods along the brook like fog. I take my seat and a tawny owl calls from nearby, tu-whit, her voice edging closer. I close my eyes to better locate the sound and I am immersed in the sea-shoal sounds of the woods moving to the wind’s tune. The owl’s call is answered and she moves off; defence or desire pulling her away. Time passes, but it’s more difficult than I would expect to sit still for long with eyes closed, saturated in a world of sound, with the feel of the wind, and the scent of the earth tugging gently at deeply buried emotional triggers.
Twenty minutes of numbing concrete and a calf twitching with nettle stings draws me out, and I slip away across the fields and back home.
I wrote this for the Countryfile 2022 writing competition. I didn’t win…
Soft calls above the maize, a flock a hundred strong and more of swallows gently sculling against the breeze. Pale feather’s snared in a single tall stem of grass passed by the mower. A covey of partridge startle, exploding from scant cover as though fired by a trip wire unseen in the thin grass. The buzzard’s feather was resting among the brambles, soft and downy translucent brown and pale. Across by the badger setts the fresh scent of hay mingles with hidden death, nesting material scattered around the mouths of yawning tunnels.
Autumn blooms under the hedgerows, the dried and hollowed leaves curled in tight yellow and brown fists, the squirrel sucking the juice from bold, red, haws, and lime green acorns brushed in neat piles. In the harvest field rooks and crows call it forward, lustily gleaning the freshly sown seeds before lifting and whirling across the land as the harvest raised dust before. The bare brown earth is now punctuated by the bold white strutting seaside sounds of gulls, put to clattering flight by the taunting rooks.
Thistledown season, silent drifting fairies ride the warm air, a breeze heads which barely stirs the dust amid the yellowing prairies. Chattering, the swallows came in the owl-light, a high whirling squadron, chasing unseen insects, tails streaming, chasing each other and filling their bellies for the long flight south. Harvest done, the crow’s and pigeons patrol the stubbles in the dim light, gleaning the last of the spilt grain.
A careless twitch of the steering wheel and the combine missed a ten foot long slew of wheat, stems blackened by summer dust standing still, heads bent by the rain and wind, among the stubbles. Beyond a clutch of wild chamomile bows to the breeze, heads saved by the furrow ground in to the spring earth by heavy machinery. A flock, a school perhaps, of summer-laden swallows skims close to the cropped bristles, chittering to each other like aerial dolphins as they pursue relentless bugs. In a corner where the grass meets the stubble, uncut sun braised stalks hide a grasshopper striking a solitary note.
The snail wright came in the night, derelict, broken, raw shells scattered around a favourite stone anvil. Two summer jays resplendent and bold in pink, and purple, and orange, fly with guttural calls, escorted by small, grey birds. The wrens songs bash up to each other, bubbling vigorously like an unwatched pot. Spires of colour, the fireweed points skywards thrusting above the silvering grasses and low clung brambles, their own pale flowers wrapped and awaiting the sunshine.
Down my lane 