We’ve had some early, unexpected snow.
Herald difficult journey’s that, in spite of reading boastful council social media posts about the mountains of grit and new snow machinery, ready for what the winter will bring, the roads were eerily absent of both.
Snow is lovely, if you’ve nowhere in particular to get too and for a change, a very slow train journey out of London back home was rather pleasant. I watched as shopping centres, houses, roads, railings, trees, fields, cars and a castle, slipped from view as the landscape rapidly turned to black and white. Magical!
When I did finally get out into the great white outdoors, the familiar landscape was now filed with unfamiliar shapes, or no shapes at all. Ground meeting the sky meant a readjustment of senses; touch, sound and smell working hard. Boots crunching underfoot, lungfuls of cold air, tingling fingers and a bad choice in socks.
One excited dog!
The trees transformed play tricks and the deer and dog are aware of one another before I am, thankfully too far down the slope so no chance of a furious chase. A hungry blackbird pecks away beneath a tree in the gap between trunk and snow. Are frozen worms easy to detect? Little dollops of frozen snow and ice attached like cotton balls dotted on the bushes. Three red kites shooting the winter breeze.
We were treated to a beautiful dawn with streaks of pink slowly turning orange above the white Chiltern hills heralding a new day, and because we’d all been so good, the most brilliant of sunset skies offset by the corduroy fields.
Just before the rain came and washed it all away, the fields were full of footprints, lines and tracks, domestic and wild, like a battlefield of furious activity. The forlorn remains of melting snowmen, faces and buttons slipped off and lying on the ground. Dinner for a hungry deer?
For four intense days, the changed vista’s, opportunities to scream your lungs out as you fly down a snowy slope, fingers and toes frozen, dramatic skies and excited children remind me it’s so good to be alive!
Please sir, may we have some more?
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