A village wedding is always an occasion, and draws folk back who have long since left to find their place in the wider world. At the reception I sat with several of the people my children went to school with. Though they are now long adult, I still carry a mental image of them as the band of youthful adventurers who explored the local countryside on bikes in the long summers of memory.
I’d hoped to hear stories of their new lives in places from London to Japan, but they wanted to discuss the things that have happened in the village since they left.
They spoke of the accumulation of small, incremental alterations that have grown – almost unremarked – into greater changes. Housing development where the Victorian school used to be, the growth of the trees by its replacement, the paving of the lane by the stone cottage that generations of children have insisted is haunted, of who is still here, and who – sadly – has passed.
Somehow, a December wedding seems to highlight the start of a new cycle of life much as the approach of the solstice does for the natural world. Walking the village footpaths the following day I noticed afresh the range of interlocking lifetimes, some lived at wildly different paces. The old school is gone, but the hawthorn-hedged path that served it for a century remains – still guarded by the iron kissing-gate.
Beyond it, some sheltered beech trees retained a pale selection of leaves from the past summer, while the bulk of fallen material lay as a damp, fermenting mulch on the soil below. The skeletal crowns of the oak trees, dormant and waiting for spring, described almost fractal patterns across the grey winter sky. In the distance, against a backdrop of ancient mountains, the rain-swollen afon Rheidol wandered through a landscape that has probably changed little in human memory.
I wandered back through a dusk scented with wood smoke and raised a glass to the health and future of the bride and groom.
