|
waiting6th Dec 2024Waiting There are days when there is a sense of expectation; something is in the air, poised, unseen, but definitely there. Tell-tale signs hint, waiing for reality to determine.
The river seems to be a recurrent focus of some of these blogs. It is a short wander from the house, and a threat if the 'tide' is high. When real high tide and low pressure combine, then a high-running river threatens the benign stasis. The first marker is a flooded meadow.
Today, we are on the edge. A few days with occasional pulses of rain, after the floods of the weekend had ebbed, suggest the river ought to be up. It is. It also carries with it a sense of foreboding. The water managers had dropped the weir level downstream , flushing out the system in expectation of a hike in flow. They seem right.
Leaning over the bridge in the dark brought burbles against the parapets, and the flapping of ropes on distant, naked, flagpoles in a gathering wind. The great meadow showed tiny shards of silver under a tempered steel blue-black sky. Those shards rippled in the wind: pools of water stretching discontinuously across the meadow.
With a pulsing wind, the guffles of geese and whistles of arriving wigeon stretched out across the waterscape. Snipe, as ever, twitched and shot off. The river was muscular, flexing itself, yet still within banks. The whole sense was one of possibility, likelihood, and certainty. By the second, the odds were coming down, and bets were beginning to be hedged. Whilst it was safe, and rain was yet to come, it somehow seemed prudent to leave and trudge across the gathering flood before ...
As I left, accompanied for a while by my friend, there was a sense that we were waiting to lose the meadow again under water, and that the wait would not be for long. |
|
