Catching up - Part 1
mnfaure wants wintery descriptions. There was a wonderful one on the journey down to Cornwall and I can't really do it justice, but here's some of what I scribbled when we arrived.
Sometimes the world is kind and plucks sights that have so far only existed in your head out into the light and they’re amazing.
We were travelling in the early hours of the morning. Consequently, we’d been in the dark, punctuated only by the motorway lights and occasionally light pollution from some industrial estate so that the first glimmerings of light off to our left didn’t seem real, somehow. But it was one of those rare mornings where the temperature was lower in the south than it had been in the usually-frozen north, when we‘d set off.
We pulled up near Okehampton to fill the car and stretch our legs and there, against the first, faint dusky-blue glimmerings of daylight in a crystal-clear sky, was a kestrel. It hovered for some time, looking for unwary beasties before darting off, just a little way, then hovering again in a hunt over fields that were still dark, to us.
As we set off again we still needed the headlights, but it was getting dimly grey enough to see the hedges and the grass at the roadside as we went. As the grey-blue gloom gradually gave way to real dawn, we saw that there had been a very thick frost during the night - every blade of grass looked like it had been hand-coated with sugar crystals.
The sun came up over the horizon as we were crossing Dartmoor, still on the part where there are trees and hedges so that the pinkish light made the leaves that were still on the branches (so many of them, even at the end of November!) gleam - coppery and bronze, under sweep after sweep of silver frost. It took my breath away.
And as the sun rose higher, the shady side and the hollows were still brilliantly white but the sunward sides shone out emerald green as the melting frost made tiny rainbows flash and sparkle as we went by.
You don’t really expect to experience the numinous while you’re in a little red Fiesta on the motorway, but I tell you, nature will surprise you, every time….