minuet

I was not driving this morning up the hill, past the last pig field, now fallow. So I watched the standing crows suddenly switch from random to ranked as we drew perpendicular to the low, wide furrows left after the harrow had been dragged out from the road and back. Each bird stood, for best prospect, on the local maximum, the crowns between the dips.

I had a gentle weekend, a stroll around the charity shops while youngest son partied on the beach; a steady, measured clip of the front hedge - looking carefully for the hidden form beneath this year's long tresses. The form I found was flatter than the last two trims, with just a few hollows where the cows had chewed out the thornless patches. I read the children's books and cooked and washed up and relaxed.

The music is still here. Dried out, my finger tips feel like someone else's. I don't think I'll read braille left-handed now. I find that, instead of finger tip pain, it is finger tiredness that stops me from mandolin practice; that and consideration for my fellow humans.

The hedges, the trees, seem to have recovered from the drought. Under the tall herbaceous stems in the borders though, the earth is nearly bare except for a few drawn stems of grass. No mosses cloak it and, yet, no seedlings sprout. The lawn has kept to green, fruit swells and, in the tubs and lined frames, the ponds and pools are near the brim. My fish, I'm sure, has not survived the December weather, but water will always bring forth life of its own accord. The tadpole pond still has some tiny froggish tadpoles, but we also found, on Sunday, delicate ones with front legs dominating; common newts. We had suspected that we had eggs, but we hadn't had newts breeding there before this year.