I took the farm track this afternoon, the one that cuts through between the fields. You know the kind, where the pavement stops and the dirt takes over, and suddenly you're walking through someone else's working land. The wooden gates frame the entrance like a threshold, and once you're through, the noise of the road feels very far away.
The clouds were still doing their thing, rolling overhead in that restless May way, but the light kept breaking through in patches. The fields on either side were at different stages, one side still green and growing, the other already golden with grain coming in. I've walked this path dozens of times by now, but today I found myself really looking at the way the track itself has worn into the earth, two pale lines where boots and boots and boots have gone before.
It's the quiet that does it, I think. Not silence exactly, but the kind of quiet where you can hear the grass moving, hear the distant hum of traffic that doesn't touch you here. My mind went somewhere soft and loose, the way it does when the body is just moving and the scenery is handling itself. No rush to be anywhere. No one else on the path that I could see, just me and the fields and whatever birds were keeping to the hedgerows.
By late afternoon the light shifted again, warmer somehow, and the whole landscape glowed gold for a stretch. The trees in the distance became silhouettes, and the sun was doing that thing where it finds gaps in the clouds and makes everything dramatic without trying. I stood there for a while, not taking a picture, just watching it happen. Sometimes the best moments are the ones you let pass without documenting.
