Today at last there is a hint of Spring. The wind is up. It still has its chill but the sun is warm. Clouds are everywhere: great hulks, thin streaks and little puffs like that look like they’ve appeared from a cartoon steam engine stream across the sky. They all come and then go in less than a minute. And as one of those giants passes over the sun lights up the near world like a great aperture being opened. On the corner of Stoney Lane, where I used to sit on the gate as a child, a pigeon flaps about amongst the blossom sending petals spiralling onto the road.
Only a few of the rooks are cawing in the trees today opposite the entrance to Wiltown Farm. In the small yard beside the barn, sheep with their winter coats on mill about calling to each other. They suddenly clamour and gather as Marie appears from amongst them. As she closes the gate they stick their heads through the metal bars calling after her.
The daffodils are now at their best, their great trumpets facing outwards as if about to produce a fanfare for the changing of the season. And on the barn behind them the owl and the pussycat look down the hill to Hambridge.
Mum is here at the cottage doing some gardening. She’ll teach me later the names of the plants I don’t know: Bride’s Veil, Pulmonaria and Japonica, all of them already displaying their colours of white, blue and an ox blood red.
The sun is stronger. I imagine it encouraging the sap to rise and I have a new spring in my step. A pair of yellow brimstones flit up and down the new laurel hedge on the path past the tennis court at May Tree House.
Jane’s gardener is wheeling the barrow to the front garden when I get to the top. I say morning to him from two metres behind him but he plods on his shoulders hunched.
When I get home Mum tells me he’s almost the same age as her. She’s 92.
A light blue fuzz has appeared over the field as it curves west. It wasn’t here last week. It’s the same colour of the pale blue of the sky as it reaches the horizon. They are hundreds of small blue flowers quivering in the wind.
As I cross over into the bottom field and head south, a billion blades of grass flutter and shimmer in the sun above one enormous bank of cloud that stretches from east to west for as far as the eye can see. The grass stems flicker like sea glitter.
At Windmill Cottage Jane is in her conservatory chatting to another lady with grey hair in her conservatory. At the front of the house there are two pairs of honey coloured saddle stones standing like sentries at each corner of her lawn . Around their feet the pink flowers and floppy leaves of elephants’ ears dance in the wind. Along the border between them are clumps of grape hyacinths and all along the drive a profusion of daffodils nod to each other happily in the sun.
The Slow Walker 