The green lane, passes through the frozen, open fields. The field’s borders are lost in the icy white fog. Sounds have crept away to some secret place, biding their time for some warmer, wetter hour.
Wren darts and busies himself through the dark, damp lattice of the hawthorn bush. “One, and one, and one, and another one”. Though the land seems barren in its coat of ice, there are snacks a plenty for the bright-eyed little brown bird. Ceaselessly he forages, dropping low, close to the ground, then dart, dart, dart, up through the branches, bobbing to stab another hapless bug cradled in the rough bark.
In dusty blue, a solitary figure scrunches its way down the lane slowly, cracking crisp grass, hard water, stiff mud as he goes.
Overhead, geese are on the move. A long V, breaking, shaping, forming. Constant chatter “I’m here, You here? I’m here”Their voices, the sound of their wings, the shape of their flight carry the feel of the salt marshes, the open spaces, the edges of the land. And not just the nearby marshes, but way beyond, far away, over the sea, the icy tundras and rock fields of the north countries. These unseen places echo in their honks, in their formation, in their purposeful path. Somehow their very being speaks of other places, cold, wild and open. And in carrying these echoes they weave them into the land below, the wide flat fields, the tall hedgerows, the woodland islands, the brick-and-flint houses. The land somehow holds those distant places in its field, brought by the passing birds.
This is a place called here.
Wren senses the approaching blue figure. His body responds, no thought here, two dipping swoops and he has passed down the nether side of the hedge, past the figure, unseen. Bluecoat’s eyes are on the geese. Wren returns to foraging, “one, one, another one”.
The oak oaks further up the hedgerow, shaping the gesture she has held for a hundred years or more, standing with still strength, up, up, up into the air, teeming with the life of countless million others. She acts without moving, speaks without sound. If you listen you can hear the language of her silence.
And all around, the presence of the ice. The air has brought her here, laying her gently on everything in the night. Now the day carries the beauty of white frost, the sharpness of breath like a knife, the stillness that wraps everything in its touch.
Bluecoat drinks hot coffee from his flask.
The sun pushes a faint disk through the fog. The fog has retreated to beyond the edge of the green-sown field. Wren still feeds, working back down the hedge now bluecoat has gone. Like a thousand other beings in the green lane, most of whom bluecoat never saw, his moment of alarm is forgotten, his instant of hiding over.
This now is the here of all things alive in the lane, the hedge, the fields, the air.
