A Pattern of Light

We sat outside and looked across the valley towards the Radnor Forest, but now at 9.20pm it is almost dark.  This is the way the days start to shorten, when we least expect it and at times we are not present.  I am usually awake from 6.30 onwards when it is starting to get light, but a month ago of course it was light an hour before that. Having said that the wind woke me - and the dog - at 4.30am, a slow wind rising, banging the doors through the open windows and bringing a light rain.  I got up to close the windows and the world outside was a heavy soft grey, thick like woollen mist, the very faint beginnings of the dawn.  

Today it felt stuffy and heavy and damp, jeans weather not weather for linens.  Yesterday was warm and we sat outside at a friend's house, a garden full of shrieking children, the table groaning with North African food, heavy rich scents for a hot day.  The sunlight on a green hayfield, no wind, perfect motionless trees.  The fields are golden with wheat or stubble, the hedgerows thick smudges of green, the landscape an abstract pattern of greens and golds, dark boundaries and bright open fields.