“Listen!” said nobody, probably the breeze, but it felt like the right thing to do. There’s a pile of branches cut from fallen horse chestnut boughs next to a storm‑blown beech tree, a still life from carnage that makes a good place to sit. “Sometimes I sits and thinks, sometimes I just sits,” (an old Shropshire saying), and the breeze strengthens with thoughts it has gathered and shunts through the sky.
From somewhere south, clouds lumber over the horizon at a snail’s pace, in a daydream of rippling air, eating these country miles. The chime of a cuckoo, or the memory of one, haunts the breeze. It brings a rare clarity, as if elsewheres that are usually smudgy and far have been drawn into the same nostalgic field. Blown in by deja vu, distant hills of the Wrekin, Caer Caradoc, Long Mynd and Stiperstones loiter on the margin. Close by, a blackbird sings into the clear airflow, and another improvises a reply from further trees.
Oaks sigh on their outer surfaces but inside their leaves patter like rain. Birches dance as if submerged. Earthmovers at the waterworks groan and a grime track is sucked from a cab and lost to the breeze. Two wasps hover around a burrow, their buzzing dispatches from the world to the hidden colony stifled. A robin shuffles feet at a gatepost. Along the lane, the frequencies of pink campion, white bramble and yellow buttercup are picked up as the breeze scrolls through a June playlist; their beautiful flies, fading.
Down by the brook, the breeze and the meadow grass are having the same idea: silver dogs racing down the valley, chasing the myth of a creature shaken from shadows. Sawn logs on the horse chestnut pile hold their own recordings of summer’s joy and strife in annual rings. The beech tree, although downed and with most of its roots in the air, has a couple of branches full of irrepressible leaves. Listen, the ruins of these trees have their own stories to tell of a lost garden. All these things and their thoughts are winnowed out, to be whispered into the future on a breeze.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
