On the bike. There was a thin cloud cover in the sky to begin with, little cloud-bunches like flowers, like shady puffs of dandelion clocks, so the sun would flare briefly, then dim. Up the long hill of the Earlston road, up and up, past the windfarm and then the peaks of the Eildon hills in the distance, in a haze. The road swings left and I had forgotten the long downhill stretch after that. It goes on and on. The cloud has melted like thin wax. Somewhere else, it will gather together again, but all it has left here are some faint dramatic streaks of white against the blue of sky as if someone has ripped a white silk sail or parachute into shreds leaving only a few remnants, torn and tangled threads – whether this passion was anger or desire is not clear.
The sky looks remote and intimate all at once, says nothing. The trees are at the height of their leafy tumultuous green, spreading like fingers on the arms of their beloved – moving, waving, not holding on, just resting, not removing their desire, not leaving, just swinging slightly backwards and forwards, a caressing of – air fields and the uncoiling ropes of time. One hedge curves and shimmers, every leaf in movement, every leaf reflecting light, a beech hedge trimmed and streamlined, flowing downhill.
Everything is in movement, the thinning cloud haze, the angle of the road that makes one hill hide behind another (une colline peut cacher une autre) – the rippling effect of the slight wind and, going downhill, that best-ever feeling of warm slope and tree breath against your bare arms and everything is welcome here, in the sun’s domain, and the loneliness of bare trees in winter stacked logs by the roadside and the dark twigs of tree branches, with no dreams on them at all, all that is gone.
The beech hedge ripples downhill, that clothe the wold and meet the sky/and through the fields the road runs by on the lip of another valley, there are so many levels of horizon, so many shades of greens. The dark pine green – the rocks, foundation of the forest – and the shimmer of the beech, a shawl thrown downhill like a gauntlet, down into the valley, before the next rise, the next wold, the next horizon.
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