Following the feet

Even if March, a lunchtime walk beyond the first water meadow slightly dusts my feet. Mud is there to be found by the thirsty wasp, the probing beak of waterfowl, but the path is dry. The leaf litter rattles and pops in the sun and the occasional scurry of furred or feathered feet. Birds call out, love and alarm, threat and food. Great-tits saw, chiff-chaffs call eponymously, wrens laugh and trill in greater proportion to their size; crows crow and all over the woods, the nuthatches are whooping at each other like the ones in my garden. Amongst the brimstones I see a single white, a single brown (some sort of fritillary I wonder).

I pass the place I watched a chaser last year; this year just a stream, the pool deleted by waterway maintenance. Across the water meadow looking out for the swampy patches, flagged by soft rush, but finding only cracked mud. Black spiders run, avoiding my shadow; I avoid them in turn, twisting my footfalls to mimise the genocide. A ground beetle.

I pause on the following bridge to watch the still ditch. I hear gulls testing out the thermals over the wooded ridge, the alternating alarm and scalding of a wren, hoping to keep the destination for its full beak of moss a secret, but still in a hurry to build. The faint stink of still water frequented by livestock overcomes the air, which is otherwise almost undisturbed. The nearest hawthorn trees are marked with a green outline and further up the ditch is a willow with a straw coloured halo. These colour patterns follow the field edges and merge with the faint pink of silver-birch trees and the stubborn browns of the slower oaks and the beeches, still diplaying a crisp crop from last autumn. Towards the town and river a dog barks, its owner barking still louder, so I move back again, mindful of the spiders but watching the shape of two buzzards following the gulls and crows up in circles.

Joining the few open bluebells in the woods I find a single violet and, returning to fields and sun, a dead-nettle in bloom. The dandylions poke their golden muzzles up, measuring the year as surely as their later seeds will measure the hours.