On a Saturday we walk out along the greenway to a small graveyard surrounded by farmland. Around the remaining gables of a church held up by almost primeval ivy, thick ropes clenched around stone, the ground is uneven and strewn with snowdrops and sheep dung, in which are hidden iron crosses and a small stone figure, ruff around its neck. Gravestones vary: some are recent, others ancient; some are large slabs bearing carved family crests, which you can barely read beyond “Here lyeth the body of …”, and others are small poignant markers where children are buried. As we leave, a child greets my dog from afar: “Hi Sam!”

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“This is forgetfulness: that you remember the past/ and not remember tomorrow in the story.”—Mahmoud Darwish

Of late: funerals (one for a man who committed suicide, cortege driving slowly down Main Street, everyone gathered on the pavement to watch solemnly), and conversations about art and craft, in studios and around tables in kitchens or bars. There is ever so much to do: not only work, chores, and errands; but also art, and writing, and catching up on your lives (hi, Diaryland), my friends’ lives, the lives of fictional others. Always, I move through landscapes that mirror interior ones: the past, a graveyard; the future, a wood strewn with young trees newly fallen by storms.

I take a break and lie in bed, looking at the sky as its colours change in the deepening dusk, reaching that blue that is the blue of the sublime, until everything is swallowed up by darkness. Tomorrow: snow.

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