I never write two posts on the same day. In fact, I often slack off and miss writing posts for a week or more 😛
Today is a record breaking day, people. This will be my second post for today.
I wrote my high school tips post yesterday and scheduled it for today, but I’ve had some spare time, so I’m writing another post. This one is going to be something new compared to the traditional posts. I’m just going to write. Describe, and do it every Wednesday if I can. Hence the title: writing Wednesday. This is just meant to be enjoyed, if not amusing, and maybe it’ll give you some inspiration.
The topic today?
I’m going to write about what the evening was like yesterday. Here’ goes.
The world is still, even though the rain came and dissolved the snow to sorry brown heaps hiding in the shade of the firs on our property. It’s warm enough for the birds to be out. On a late spring evening of this temperature they might have been signing up in the branches, ruffling their feathers every so often to shake off the heavy drops that roll off the leaves above.
But there are no birds.
They are still on vacation somewhere warmer, where the sun is eternally close to the earth, heating the water, heating the san, burning lounging backs and faces.
Canada is much colder than that place this time of year. Or it should be.
Instead, I’m left standing alone in a field with only the broken and dried wisps of grass as company… remains of a once lush carpet that died last fall.
I suppose it is cold. In a strange sort of way. It’s cold in the sense that the very air is damp. Enough so that a chill runs down my spine unbidden and I pull my coat closer around me. Mist curls around the trees, and in the lower dips of our field-hugging the ground. Mist that makes everything look like someone has taken an eraser and started rubbing in places of the world, fading the colour, fading the hard shapes of wet tree trunks that hide behind it.
Part of the chill is probably the silence.
Beyond the fence, even the horses stand still, their wide eyes watching my progress towards them. Their ears flick back and forth, as if they can hear something in the forest that I can not. I imagine a fox, silent and swift, racing through the underbrush to disappear with a flick of its tail.
Though I try, I can not hear anything beyond the squelch my own boots make in the mud. Even in the field, the dirt beneath the grass is nothing but muck, and each steps leaves a heavy print.
I reach the fence and duck between the two bottom boards, entering the horse’s pasture. Here everything truly is muck. The horses have churned up the ground by the barn so much by walking on it that it is nothing but mud, and the sad pieces of grass and dead leaves that have gotten churned in. My boot prints look strange beside the half-moon ones that the horses leave.
Trees shadow the barn, as it is half hidden away in the forest, and I pause a moment to avoid getting dripped on. I’ve always thought that everything looks more aesthetic after a rain. The darks of the woods are even darker, and the greens of the forest are much more vibrant. It’s the perfect contrast, and just dying for a camera. This is true now, however, there are no greens, but that of the pine trees, and those greens are so deep they nearly blend with the black browns of the branches they belong to. This rain has done nothing but make the world darker, and with the fading sun and the chill in the air, everything suddenly feels lonely.
It feels like a scene straight out of a horse movie. The farm and the horses add to that feeling, but most of it is in the mist, and the rain, and the rich smell of earth. Mixed with rain, and the scent of the forest, it’s rather a nice combination. The sort of thing you’d expect to smell right as you started off on a long adventure through the woods. Face the barn, and the smell is not nearly as pleasant. The rain and pine is still there, but now manure and hay has entered the mix. If you visit the horse barn at any fair, during the rain, then that is the exact smell that exist. Hay is a musky weathered sort of scent, like the forgotten traces of fall and harvest are still laced through it. And manure is exactly that. Some people can’t stand it. But truly, it is just the smell of earth, but much stronger. It smells like horse. Like farms. Like wet mud.
Speaking of which, the mud is gorgeous. Rain still runs rivers through it, and in some parts it is so soft and deep that if I stepped there it would surly come up to the ankles of my books. It’s like the lottery for a three year old.
Truth be told, even when I was older when we moved to this place (I was six at the time) I used to play in the mud for years after. Not sitting in it and getting it all over myself, mind you.
But crouching there in rubber boots in the spring, a stick in hand as I would dig trenches and pile up pebbles to make waterfalls, pretending I had made some great river that tiny people would come to admire for ages to come. I would play in that mud until my hands got all tingly from the freezing water and dirt, and my boots had long since sunk in a good couple centimetres.
Now I have calculus homework to get back to, and I must get the horses in and fed before dark, but I do look wistfully at the mud and little rivers, remembering a childhood I’ll always cherish.