I walked the same path I've walked a hundred times, but the weather had other ideas. Started at the gate with those heavy clouds hanging low, the kind that make you wonder if you should turn back. The fields were quiet though, that green-gold stretch where I always seem to lose track of time. There's something about the way the light shifts when the clouds move, how a field can look completely different moment to moment.
I kept going anyway. The dirt track runs straight enough, and I like following it past the cottage where the wooden gate sits half-open. You can see for miles from up there, all the way across to the tree line. Today the view kept disappearing and reappearing as the clouds rolled through. One minute the whole valley was visible, pale greens and golds laid out like a map. The next minute it was all grey and close, like the sky had dropped down to meet the fields.
By the time I reached the deeper part of the path, where the wildflowers were coming in thick along the edges, the light had changed again. Softer. The clouds had broken up enough that there was actual brightness coming through, and the whole landscape looked like it was breathing. Those white flowers on the left side caught it just right, and the grass track ahead looked almost luminous against the darker grass on either side.
I didn't have anywhere to be, so I just stood there for a while. Watching how the weather works its way across the land, how it rewrites what you're looking at. That's mostly what I come out here for now, I think. Not to get somewhere, but to be where I can watch it all shift and change. The pavement ends and the real weather starts, and somehow that feels like coming home.
