THE COVID MONTHS | THE VELVET HOUR

                                                                    I walk here most days. I feel at home in the big open skies, the endless rough grass, the ancient sweet chestnuts silhouetted against the late afternoon sky. The cold fresh crisp air fills my lungs. Now I can breathe. And then it comes, the peace comes. The voices in my head stop. Turned off, tuned out, shut down. Now I am on my own. Here there is only silence. I step inside the velvet hour, that magical time when daylight and dusk begin their courtship slipping closer, moving in tandem joining together in a soft tender embrace as dusk caresses and woos the light persuading her to grow softer, darker, until finally she is enveloped.

Timing is everything. It is easy to miss the entrance to the velvet hour. With every passing day it is over two minutes later, over fourteen each week. Sometimes in my eagerness I have arrived too early and had to wait impatiently for its arrival. Sometimes, I have come too late and the darkness has swallowed it. The deer stand together silent, watching, eating. Sometimes they cross in front of me their huge antlers etched against the velvet sky. I stand still like a statue so as not to disturb them.

Then the pheasants begin their roosting dance between the trees, their loud metallic grating calls piercing the silence. Sometimes a single pheasant will sit at the top of a tree like a badly placed Christmas decoration, distracting and disorderly. Owls begin their evening flight swooping low as they hunt silently for dinner. Down by the lake the swans rest, silent and still.  This is a magical place, an enchanted kingdom. I have stepped between the breath of time, the peace of solitariness, the beginning of the end and with darkness comes the end of the beginning. For this time this is my place. I am calm, I am at peace, I am still, I am breathing in rhythm with nature’s world.