online: 14 october 2009 modified: 13 october 2009 12 october 2009 a grassy clearing
hockey field
...sitting here almost level with a stretch of grass... listening to various bird calls while gazing at a wall of tall trees beginning to turn yellow... and up above the blue sky almost hidden by a thin layer of grey and yellowish cloud...
...facing westward i feel or read the presence of the Atlantic in these temperatures and colours and the variability i love...
p
another unintended letter p that i am not going to delete
...deep breath, spontaneous, and the sound of someone running in the forest behind me through which i've just walked and in which i paused to look at a perhaps sacred grove or circle of closely spaced fir trees from which I took a fragment to identify on return...
[...it could be one of several kinds of cypress]
...i suspect the circle was planted (perhaps in the 19th century) with pagan intentions, certainly not Christian... no trace of Jesus here, only of hockey...
[this is the hockey field that a player told me was booked in the name of 'Dr Joad's party'... he of the BBC's brains trust of the 1940's or 50s and surely a humanist]...
...a man wearing a dark blue rucksack and a green baseball cap walks by and says hello... and now another man walks across the middle of the hockey field carrying a yellow plastic bag and not looking to right or left... this ubiquitous American cap is by now local everywhere but I prefer not to wear one... i pefer the sailor's cap i've worn for decades...
...but now the surface of the lawn or field of short grass seems alive to me, interrupted by many mole hills, now on the north side but formerly on the south... where i can see only one...
i stop writing to take in the cool air, and the serenity, the sunlight illuminating the tops of trees... the lower parts are already in faint shadow... it's the moment to go...
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