Season’s end

Out into the lanes, crossing the paths between the fields. Clouds of ivory flecks, mists of midges, fly out of the ditches and up into our eyes in a dusty, day’s-end, sun-down smudge.  Past brittle, puckered, hollowed-out hedges and their dying, clinging, crowns of old man’s beard.

A veil of dull gold is pulled taught across the sky, polishing duck-egg blue and puffy clouds to a brume of apricot sand.

Along the crunching, gravelled avenues, past the battered, bone-grey sway of harvested maize stalks. Around the snapped and jagged gourd-red, pumpkin-orange husks spilling kernels like a witch doctor’s broken rattle onto cinnamon-grey earth.

Warm, malty, heady harvest so intense you could fall back and rest against its pillow; wrap yourself in its simpleness, be consoled by its ordinariness – the seasons come, and then they go.

Late-afternoon flights silently cross and score the dimming sky like shooting silverfish.

For today, all that we have – all that we see – is all that we will ever want.