Your moods eschew the constancy and comfort of my familiar, lazy days spent under the warmth of a perennial sun. Instead you offer yourself in winks and seductive head tilts; a ray of sun briefly and gloriously highlighting a green patch of tender grass, bending softly under the push of a sudden breeze; a fast moving cover of cloud, simultaneously as grey as lead and as white as cold breath, torn and frayed at the edges by the wind that picks up pace.
Then calm, quiet, as your multitude of clouds pause to hover over puddles of rainwater, suspended there like thoughts. Tree branches stretch askew and twisted towards the changing sky. No longer dressed in lush green, they now proudly display a naked honesty all their own.
Your snow gathers pace outside my window, small flakes falling on the otherwise ignored, the mundane, sad blandness of dirty gravel and unkempt grey stone we choose not to see day to day. Bushes and branches are covered in fluffy, heavy clumps of white, as if enveloped in cotton wool for safekeeping.
How can a blanket of white gather so many lost thoughts in its widening reach, bringing them home to the core of the soul, even if fleetingly, for a moment of peace like this? Like an invisible net it casts its healing, overarching power over the world’s confusion and alienation, changes the light, alters the sound into a layered quietness that speaks loudly to the heart.
My country is where the sun conspires with the shifting earth to cast a long, stretching shadow on slow moving time. But this right here is where the earth jolts, hungrily holding on to fleeting, softer light and the ever changing colour of air, like parting lovers on a train platform, their kiss savoured, the scent remembered, their indelible memories first cradled carefully like precious stones, then engraved onto their souls.
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