Here is something I don’t want to talk about. I put it away in a cardboard box in my mind, not to be examined too closely. Do Not Touch. Fragile. This Way Up.
I know by the time we take that walk that I will leave. I won’t see these fields again or this muddy track. I have been happy here, after a fashion. I try to memorise the way my boots crunch on the gravel path, the stones in the bank down which I scramble to get to the stream. I take long breaths to feel the air of this place in my lungs.
It rained last night, and the water is silvery and clear. It tumbles joyfully around each bend with a splash. I slide down the verge, slick with mud, skidding, to reach the stony shore. I take off my shoes to stand barefoot in the icy water, watching my feet turn pink from the cold and feeling the rounded pebbles under the bridge of my foot. I dip one finger in the water, letting ripples form around it. What do you see? Reflect on the purpose: visualize your question or say it out loud. A clear blue and brown expanse. Light and nothingness, slippery as an eel. Under which, a landscape of foothills with long arms, grey pebble strewn paths which lead to small mounds like stony hills. Is that a cottage on the hillside? A village or a high street? Are those mountains? Shifting as the water ripples over it, becoming the sky and the earth and trees, green with spring.
The calves I once watched amble in the field, all legs and knees, as they grew into silent, judgmental things, huffing steam over out from under a fringe, are gone. Was I away so long? There are horses there now, trotting gracefully through the long grass and tossing their heads disdainfully at strangers. I hold out my hand and a chestnut bay whickers a soft nose across my palm like a benediction.
I squish and squelch my way through a grove of white birch trees, their bark peeling back to show the black bones beneath. On the other side, a path leads up the hill through a field of thistles and blue and white wildflowers. There is the oak tree with the swing that I found one summer. In the distance, the smoke from the chimney of the farm with the dog that barks at the gate. I stand and look out towards the mountain I once trekked up, snow covered now in early January. Ribbons of roads leading through a toy town, with a toy train that puffs along its track on the other side of the river.
As I turn away, I hear the laughing of a crow in the naked trees. Gone. Gone. Gone. What next?
