December Musing ~ 'Today's Single Promise'

"I climb back to the village sliding on frozen puddles. They are like holes of sky in the road. A sudden blackbird alarmed skids out of a bush chipping chains of short cries behind him. A true note of winter, like an axe on a tree, a barking dog or a daylight owl, each pure and solitary in the pause of silence from which the past and future hang.

It has now turned noon and the day slides slowly from the roofs of the sloping village. It freezes harder than ivory; one can almost see it in the air as though the light was being stretched on nails. A clear cold radiance hangs over the landscape and a crow crosses it on creaking wings. The rich earth, with all its seeds and humming fields and courtships, is now closed and bound in white vellum. Only one colour remains, today's single promise, pricked in red over the ashen world - seen in a flitting robin, some rosehips on a bush, the sun hanging low by the wood, and through the flushed cottage windows the berries of the holly and the russet faces of the feasting children."

Words from 'Village Christmas And Other Notes on the English Year' by Laurie Lee.

Illustration - Inga Moore.