LEAVES FROM A NATURE NOTEBOOK: RAINBIRDS AND HAY BALES

[photo: Ron Knight]

I CAME DOWN a back lane from Leominister. On the downhill, where the car picked up speed, the lane, lined with white cow parsley, unfurled, as though blossoming itself. Winding down the window, I dangled out a hand, intending to tattoo on the door Cold Play’s ‘Clocks’, which was loud on the stereo; and I then caught the smell of incoming rain on the evening air. And then that tension in the air that comes before rain, as the natural world, the flowers and the animals, gird themselves. Looking across to the west I saw that the long wall of the Black Mountains had assumed the ominous dark hue that prefigures downpour.