June is the wrong month to be away from your home patch. After three weeks travelling, I returned to find the landscape very different from the verdant, still-maturing spring countryside I had left, with the darkened, dusty foliage of high summer now firmly in place.
In my absence the tangled, robust hedgerows that bound the lane have thickened further with new growth, the delicate dog roses having grown from bud to full bloom while the honeysuckle flowers built from subtle to strident colour.
Where cattle had been excluded from the pasture, meadow grasses now carried fat seedheads growing pale and dry. In the full sun of early afternoon clover flowers on the point of setting seed bobbed animatedly in the strong breeze.
Weeks in the dry, high range-lands of Colorado and Wyoming had left me with a deep desire for the sights and sounds of the sea, so I headed for the coast path more quickly than I otherwise might have. The thrift flowers in the thin cliff-top turf were bleached and pallid, far from their striking pink when they are newly emerged – but the sturdy, succulent foxglove spikes were brightly and actively blooming.
I stretched out in the smooth-leafed, crisply dry grass near the cliff edge, idly watching a group of jackdaws disputing some minor trophy and listening to the erratic waves of a confused sea break on the rocks below.
Invisibly high above me, almost inaudible through the sounds of surf and wind blown grasses, a skylark began to sing – a tumbling, triumphant song that always brings to mind the summer chalk downlands of my youth.
There were many other things I should have been doing, but none of them seemed as immediately worthwhile. To the west, the sun cast a silver trail across the deep blue of the bay, and I resolved to stay a while longer.
It was still several hours until sunset, and I might yet see seals haul out on the shore, or perhaps a pod of dolphins carve a path across the seascape. I didn’t, of course.
