Tagged: wonderfulworld

We are rising, light-filled, toward the longest day. Morning after morning breaks clear across the wide sky and pours sunshine over us in spate. If it were possible to be filled to the brim with sunshine, I would be, but it keeps on coming and it’s never enough, here in a northern country where grey skies, rain and darkness hold so much sway. Contrails stitch comet-needles across the roof of the sky, and clouds have pasted themselves unmoving along the horizon. When the sun lowers it singes all the edges, turning everything rose-red, pink-gold, orange and lavender. Out watering in...

A brisk perambulation at sundown, of an evening, a fine and flowering evening, in Flyinge. The sun was a huge orange ball o’fire aglow in the west. Between it and me the tall trees of the crow party loomed, a giant’s spiky picket fence. I could see all the crow’s nests, way up high. As I walked down the snail trail, the air cooled off and the crows became agitated at my presence even with their secure distance up in the treetops. RAWK! they all screamed, and they flapped and fleaped** from nest to branch and back again. The white...

Wild swans are winging by overhead; the third time in as many days. They call as they fly and I wonder if they are just having conversations with each other, like we would on a long car trip…the younglings honking, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” and the elders threatening to turn this flock around and fly home if the kids don’t behave. Are they commenting on the things they pass at 70 miles an hour, or is it the waterfowl equivalent of buzzing the natives? “HONK HONK NYAH NYAH! Can’t catch us, boo yah!” If they’re trying...

The moon a dusty thumbprint in the sky, we follow the blue around the village. Snow is melting all around, but hanging on, hugging the ground. The edges are sun-eaten, lacey, dripping. There are ravens and rooks everywhere, as if this were a battlefield or an old Norse myth. Hugin and Munin, thought and memory. I look sideways at their sharp stabbity beaks and surprisingly small heads for such large birds. They perch atop trees, fenceposts, power lines. Another bird, silent and white, rises above a house as we walk. At first I think it is a seagull because of...