Somehow Comforting
Quiet November day, tugging wind sporting with lost leaves of lost seasons, was to him like a return to true England.
Quiet purposeful sound of it: a day of rivers somewhere, a bird or two, and sawing and hammering in the distance.
Distance not great to the eye like shut grey. Mud, too, was everywhere he saw, in the bottom of woods, paths, and churned-about, turned-over fields. Rain fell and smoked and was cold, pools grew blind and very still.
Landscape ached with dead time, but it was only the settling of vast decay. And something resisted.
A wild life under all that goes on bedraggled as a rat in wet sedge or a late flower gulping a moment of thin sun.
After the city with its grinding and sitting this countryman's England, potato-dull in November, was somehow comforting, like a walking away that was towards.
Willi am Oxley
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