Magical day

9 November

The seasons shifted. Winter doffed its hat briefly to spring. The thin gruel of cold, grey, wet days was replaced by a world as rich as a large box of assorted chocolates.

Blue sky with a few wisps of cloud. Sunshine. An absence of wind. The gentle hissing of the surf. Starlings clustered on the telegraph wires. Again the continuous burbling of a lark, heard but not seen. A red and black butterfly dancing into, and then out of the boot of the car. A greenfinch - bright orange cap, wings splashed with yellow - pulling powder puffs of seed heads from thistles. The drone of a small plane and a motorbike suddenly exploding the silence, sharing time but in different universes than this one of mine. A cloud of linnets undulating through the air. A stone chat high on a gorse bush. A wren clinging, tail cocked, to a brown stem of cow parsley.
Fiona (grey hair cut in a bob), Barry (bearded) and Katie the black cocker spaniel who told me they walk the path regularly. We had never met before, but today our lives touched before continuing their separate trajectories.
The roofs of cottages appear over stone hedges lying between me and The Beacon. I listen to a conversation between gulls. Single filaments of spiders' webs: stretched across the path, hanging between the rods of a cattle grid, and, when viewed from the critical angle, seen in their thousands, shimmering like frost, a silken blanket, suspended over the tussocks of a field.
Again I go only as far as the first gate and turn back into the woods. On the bottom of a puddle there are mud and dead leaves, but, only adjust your vision, and the still surfaces reflect the sky and the trees.