Country Life
By IAN N1ALL
DOES it rain more persistently because it is November and the leaves are falling faster? It seems to. The stream runs brown with all the soil scoured from its banks and the leaves and debris make the pools like great pots of broth in which everything is simmering. The effect is saddening. In the bare branches aloft a squirrel scampers, jumps from one tree to another and pauses to look down with anything but the jauntines:S he seemed to have in spring, while the green 'painting' on the trunks of some of the trees suggests age and decay, like the mouldering timbers of the tumbledown shed. Depression at the inevitable, Progress of a season is natural when the season is running fast towards minter, but there are moments When light shines through; moments when thrushes and blackbirds feed in the carpet of dead leaves, a hundred starlings whirl over the grass hill, or three straying Canada geese come beating above the shires, looking far ahead, in the manner of geese, and seeing, Perhaps, on the Shropshire border, Houstuan's 'blue remembered hills.' This is our world just now with Ploughing stopped, rain dripping from Dutch barn and shippon. and only a smile of sunshine when the heavens relent.
Previous page
