Field of the (another?) year.

There’s a field in Scotland, alongside a mountain stream and close to an old stone manor house.

At the end of the field, watching the water as it races through the glen stands a young man; perhaps he is still a boy.

Tonight he will play poker with others the same age as him; some he would call friends but this evening he will learn that even amongst friends, perhaps especially amongst friends, poker is a dangerous game and he will decide later that he will never play the game again.

For now though he stands alone in the field, and he is singing.

“In the chilly hours and minutes of uncertainty, I want to be, in the warm heart of your loving mind”.

He is thinking about a girl, maybe she is already a young woman; he hasn’t known her for very long but later he will know her more though at this moment in time that is far from certain.

He feels something, but he cannot put a name to it.

One day he will know that this feeling too is dangerous, but unlike poker it is a danger he will gladly court.

“To feel you all around me, to take your hand along the sand.”

He never will.

They will never run together along the sand.

It happens like that.

Somewhere else there is another field.

It is night-time.

There is no babbling brook.

There is no Scottish Glen.

But there are a thousand stars.

In this field there is a man, he is no longer a boy, he is no longer young and his friends are as far away as the stars at which he looks.

He too is thinking about a girl, one that is surely a woman.

And he is thinking about the sand.

And her hand.

“Ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind”