Wythburn Church

I set off early for work this morning because I wasn't sure of the weather but it was fine and so I had time to pull in and blip on my way to Ambleside. This was supposed to be green and abstract for Abstract Thursday but it's only green so I don't think it will make the grade but the cladonia were keen to have their photos taken so I obliged.

It's a long time since I've popped in to Wythburn Church. G. who worked as a forester in the valley as a young man remembered attending the funeral of a friend here and the sound of the men carrying the coffin down the slate aisle in their working clogs. I felt sure I could hear the echoes today.

As I drove through Grasmere valley it was early and quiet and so the echoes continued. As I sat at the roadworks for ages I looked across to Silver How and thought of all the times and periods of my life that I had walked those fells; rolling down Loughrigg after nights out at the Brit (pub) in Elterwater, countless walks through all the seasons with G., and through his history in the valley, and then across to where we scattered his ashes, and, more recently with P. before we moved to the north Lakes.

It all became stranger and very T.S.Eliot, Four Quartets, as I got to work and the first people I saw I realised were my window cleaners from many years ago and some other faces I recognised from what, to me, felt like another world. It felt very strange to see one of G's contemporaries ... and still alive. My sense of time became utterly disorientated.

Echo - Christina Rossetti

Come to me in the silence of the night;
   Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
   As sunlight on a stream;
      Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.

Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
   Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;
   Where thirsting longing eyes
      Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
   My very life again tho’ cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
   Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
      Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.