It is not dense enough to call mist, let alone fog, but February’s invisible damp gives milkiness to the air and weight to the morning’s mood. The ivy leaves in our hedge seem to droop as if they have all been licked downwards, and our garden robin hugs their shadow with its brown back to me. As I walk to the river I notice that the oak leaves by the track, which were frosted copper last month, are in mid journey from leaf mulch to soil.
Across the marsh there is no division between the grey of the sky and land, and no horizon, and the dark of the woods is burred with softness. The north-westerly is mild and lifts only the lightest vegetation – the reed tops by the sides of the path – and the moisture adds to each intake of breath the cold savour of bare earth and dead leaves.
There are birds – jackdaws yakking and rooks somewhere with their stone-shovelling music – but they are the bog standards at this season. The one unfamiliar detail is a JCB on the far side that has been slubbing out the dykes. Now its operations have temporarily ceased and from here, with the bucket buried in reed and its long neck outstretched, it looks like the corpse of some weird yellow giant locked in rigor mortis.
These dead-quiet spells of late winter involve days of no change but I love to reflect that most of spring is here but hidden somewhere in all this quiescence. In a fortnight, frogs will crawl from under stones to breed. In a month, the toads will float up from the bottom of the dykes and sing. The grass snakes that curl at the water’s edge to sunbathe by late March, are sleeping underground, and the hoverflies that will hum about the sallow blossoms by the track are buried in mud. The bare trees, even the barbed wire of the hawthorns, will soon bud and, while the swallows that nest near the manor are probably in Namibia or South Africa still, they are already moulted and have acquired that miraculous blue, which they will bring to us soon across 6,000 miles.
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