Dawn is breaking as Pants and I come back from morning walk; great cracks of crimson and violet splitting the dome of the sky. We’ve been to the orchard field, and we go down to the cricket so I can walk clean my boots.
I know my cheeks must be flushed pink, and my hair is wild. I feel vitally, wonderfully alive; the wind is soft against my face, and the air smells of green-things and earth, of new life and living.
We’ve been away for a week, playing in the French Alps, and I walk the cricket a much stronger and renewed person than before we left. Things that seemed black and impossible before have shrunk to a more reasonable size: nothing hard work and determination couldn’t fix.
I swish my boots through the over-long grass, making my strides big and looped. In places, the grass is past my shins; it’s been too wet to cut, and grows in thick, green shocks. There are lighter circles and darker circles; distinctly patched in colour.
Pants suddenly starts and then leaps in circles, barking at new horses arrived in the Prickett’s field. One is a grey that looks familiar, and I wonder if she’s the mare that lived here before. Her coat has a faint, pinkish sheen in the dawn.
I reach the pavilion, and sit briefly on the low wall that protects sun-bathing supporters in the summer. Now, the wall is empty of pint glasses and abandoned flip-flops, and gently prickles with seed-setting cushions of moss. I press one lightly, with my finger, testing the springiness.
Walking has made me warm, and I roll my sleeves. My forearms look pale and oddly bone-like in the early light. I hold one up, out from my body, and see the intense pink of the sky reflected from my winter skin.
The sky almost couldn’t be more beautiful, more ecstatic, and I know that it heralds rain and greyness to come, but I don’t care. I stand and stretch, pulling in the pink air around me.
Sometimes it’s worth the bad bits, in order to revel in the good.
Glad to see you back and ready for your new adventure, count your blessings of which you have many Carlie x
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Thank you, D, am counting!
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go get ’em kid
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Cheers to that, Terry: No Surrender!
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