Here is something I really don’t understand, even as I sort of get it. First part of that sentence, good grammar, the latter ‘now speke’. Just saying. Although I have lived all the way from grammatical stripulation, something which drove me right up into mini-skirts and the climbing out of windows after 10pm to hook up with a market stall owner and an E Type soft top, to the now of ‘like’ being the first word before pretty much every single word. It used to be ‘Um’ and that meant a knuckle rap, even in my day. In a moment, She said (all of 4 feet tall behind her desk) of hesitation, hold the silence, use your eyes, lift your chin, make it seem as if you are about to come up with something utterly profound. Your brain will catch up. She was right btw. And I thank her. She cast a very short shadow, but I remember her longer.
I walked today, this afternoon, and noticed that the grasses interrupted the track. It stopped me. I hadn’t noticed shadow before. The light is shifting, the balance too. The dying fronds luffed and danced in shadow talk. I could see it across my boots as a soft swish of goodbye for now. Onwards and into the woods, I see anew the arse end of a fallen pine, the roots highwide and skyward, a curve shadow which was t’other side before the Autumn arrived, which seems very sudden. After that I did a load of noticing, shadows longer, strange, almost confusing. Maybe shadows always are and maybe that whole confusulation is what notices us as we notice. Now there’s a happy thing. There is a theory that we miss places and times, but what if they miss us? I have places in my mind, pebbles in the wilderness of my story, which halted me. Still do when I remember them. I smell decay, the erupticus of the land taking back. The leaves turning, almost happily into red, gold, brown and falling. It is as if the earth rises up in welcome hands.
Perhaps it is something to do with the colding, the change into the dark and away from the endless summer light, when the shadows finally get their say, longing. And they do ‘long’. They are longer than the one who actually walks the earth. We are finite, minute, temporary and yet we are extraordinary, magical, pivotal, powerful, and we make a point, a mark and each of us is a Someone.
