Way Down the Road

Last night was a very wet night, it rained so hard and for so long and early this morning , it was pouring out of people's drives, part flooding the roads and water-logging the farm land. With some degree of trepidation I drove out to the reserve this morning along a Harty Road that was full of large puddles of water.

The reserve was as I expected it would be, the grazing meadows were water-logged and muddy, the ditches had at last got more than a few inches of water in them and the wind was icily cold. Looking across The Swale to the mainland, the top fields of the North Downs were covered in snow, yes, it was indeed a cold and wet morning. Gun shots briefly rung out, followed immediately by the sound of the "barking" calls of over a thousand Brent Geese rising up from the neighbouring farmland's winter corn - clearly the farmer was attempting to scare the geese away from their daily breakfast of his next year's crop.

It was bitterly cold, wet and muddy and I really wasn't enjoying it and so I left for home after a rare short visit. I hate giving in to the weather but as basically a warm weather person, there are some days when the weather wins the battle. I plonked myself down in the conservatory, put on the heating, put on some Joni Mitchell and gradually became lost in idle thoughts of, once upon a time. 

 Way back in my teenage and early twenties years, Bob Dylan sang about how "tomorrow is a long time" and throughout those years that was the kind of mantra that I lived by. I was young, the life ahead of me was an endless highway, and old age was a lifetime away - tomorrow is a long time and always to be enjoyed, what did I care. Buoyed by those thought I set out into my adult life - loves and disappointments, marriages and divorces, wealth and poverty - too many crossroads. And now, at 73, the highway that I've already traveled is the longest one, and the one still ahead gets shorter every day, the tomorrows slip by too fast, the bend in the road is the final one.