Blackbirds no longer sang in the dead of night as a cold & bitter wind had been blowing itself away during the darkness of the night & replaced with a light more westerly breeze which brought with it a grey damp gossamer mist hanging in the air, clinging with droplets of a heavy harvest of moisture upon the hedgerows & nearby hilly sloping fields. Soaking silvery spider webs encrusted with a lacey fringe gripped the bare branches & held on with a weight like watery icing. The mist hovered into the depths of the banks laid bare by winter's bleak hold & wrapped itself around each dead nettle stalk & dripped down where the soil held the roots in its grasp, earthy & pungent, rich with the nutrients of well rotted leaves from autumns past.
Down in the village, which sat comfortably tumbling gently down Dorset hillsides spreading from where the stone Norman church rang out its bells peeling over the hills across the valleys & streams to farmyards & hamlets, it is a slow Sunday & in a nearby farm, nest seeking mice had been scampering the dusty beams in the far flung rafters of an old wooden built barn. The stacked hay below still smelt of last summer's sunshine, sweet & herbaceous as the dropped seeds disappeared amongst the hidden nests of food seeking mice, roused from their winter slumbers, while cows enclosed in their winter quarters, wandered the yard lazily chewing the cud. Chimneys puffed smoke that hung in the mist enshrouded day, scented with the smell of apple boughs burning & age old oak. The village was quiet as an old, crooked legged man, hobbled his way down a narrow path disappearing into the hovering mist that enshrouded farms & cottages dotted along laneways & in the churchyard, it floated around gravestones, ghostlike, consuming all in its path. The ash trees stood silent, stripped bare after the autumn had loosened their golden leaves that still littered the ground, heavy after the melting snow. They are scattered about near the eerie churchyard with its inhabitants peacefully sleeping beneath its wintry layers, cold with the damp earth as their bed, never to see the changing seasons, no more to love & be loved.
As the village church bells continued to clang one after the other, people were starting to drift toward the heavy oak studded door & disappear into the confines of the organ playing interior. On a quiet Sunday morning the floating mist enshrouded the old bell tower, crept stealthily unobserved through trees dotted around the grassy grounds & clung to the trunk of a large yew tree. The music wafting from within the church ceased & peace ensued, that drifted over the village with only a quiet dripping where the mist had collected gently flowing down the rooftop valleys & forming into puddles. Two horses in a nearby field, blanketed against the damp, ambled & grazed the wintry grass lifting their nonchalant heads to rub against each other, steaming after a brief canter. An old dog sidles up to the horses sniffing their muzzles through the fence & wanders off along the fence to join its owner who opens a five bar wooden gate, a lady plump with life's living, graced with a ruddy complexion & large kind brown eyes. She greets the dog who dashes, tail wagging. to meet her & they both pass through the gateway & continue into the misty morning of a winter's day.
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