A weekend away

and after a delightful lunch of crossword completing and banter, a walk along country roads with 'the smelly dog.' Around me the fields spread like a smoothed duvet. The sunshine sprawls across the land, for the first time a hint of gold in its usual pale, winter bleached rays which glitter back to me from the river. On the side, reed crested, sits a grey heron, hunched against the English cold, grey backed against the dark green of the river bank, a creature of cloud, of a warmer climate. And past me, with a sudden whoosh of back blown air speed cars full of different people on their way to a million different places. People whom I will never know, never see again, people for whom this black hatted, black coated woman on the pavement is just a silhouette in their view of the countryside.

As I walk against the traffic, I see snapshots of emotions through windscreens. In one, a woman singing to her child, in another, older teenagers squabbling about a bag of sweets. In a maroon beaten up car, a whole family with possessions squeezed under a flapping blue tarpaulin speed on their way, in another a man and woman laugh, mouths open, unselfconciously caught up in the sheer spontaneity of the joke. And in another, a woman whose eyes are red with weeping, wipes tears away from her face with a white handkerchief. Another woman in the back between the front seats leans forward to offer her comfort and a younger man drives. I find myself wondering what it is that has hurt her, a relative ill or dying? A great tragedy of Aristotelian proportions or is it perhaps, stress, thoughtless words or some other irritant that whilst of great proportions to her seems as small to an objective eye as the stars that appear on a moonless night...

And against these maelstroms of emotional whirlpools in each little self contained car, the fields lie still, the grasses sway in the wind and the hedges guard, as they have for generations, the earth and land from the forces that would want to eke it away, stone by stone, crumb by crumb.

Our lives, it strikes me, are just like those cars. Each that lasts for a millisecond against the longevity of landscape. Am I and my illness just another vehicle? What kind of wind will my car leave behind it? Will my car leave litter strewn in the hedges, caught by the brambles or will my detritus fertilise and enrich the cars which follow behind me?

Only time will tell...

Minerva