Light Rain, Tipping Down, Softly.

I left the house at 8.43 am, the first day of December at the tail end of the sixty ninth year.

It was raining.

Lightly.

I headed east, hoping to see the donkeys that live in the field nearby, then in their absence turned west and climbed through the forest. It was difficult to say for certain that it was raining, perhaps the trees were simply dripping and I thought for a moment of a line of dialogue from a Billy Wilder film.

“She started crying softly, like the rain on the window-pane”

In the film the main character opened the window after the woman had left and it was hardly raining softly. It was tipping down.

The line struck me as incongruous. Clever, but incongruous. The script had been co-written by Raymond Chandler and I suspected that this line was his. I like Mr Chandler’s writing, it’s poetic sometimes, funny at others and he’s a good story teller. I would like to write like him.

But instead I carried on walking, now turning towards the south.

I followed the track up the hill, walking over a wet mosaic of fallen yellows, orange and gold; the forest smelt of nuts and earth. A deer ran across the path.

When I reached the field where the horses sometimes graze, I turned east again and went down past the cows into the valley. Underfoot the leaves gave way to rock, grey almost white to the senses. In the distance spirals of mist hung in the folds of the hills and I turned into the meadow bellow the hamlet. 

I saw no one. 

Only the stacks of wood that they had ordered for the winter, lying waiting and discarded where the delivery had been made. It was too wet to bother stacking them yet. A cock crowed, a flock of birds disturbed by something and took wing, circled over the hamlet and settled on the roof of the bread makers house. 

Two cars drove past me down the hill but I turned towards the edge of the hamlet where Alan is restoring a ruin. For now he lives alongside in a yurt, gaining access by a ladder to a high window. Perhaps it’s not a yurt, but just looks like one. 

I decided to cross the road and enter the trees, hoping to find an old path to take me to the village. Instead I came out on the lane that climbs slowly to the lake.

 I climbed slowly; wild strawberries grow along the verge in the springtime. Or is it summertime?  It was so wet that my memory of when and what the seasons offer was damp. But I was warm. 

My coat is waterproof, my boots too.

I can change trousers later........

(to be continued, maybe, one day...)