Windy Autumnal Days

I'm sitting in looking out a full wall of window, at an idyllic scene of English countryside. Lots of green trees and a meadow beyond the little stone wall. There are birds on the feeders. Usually squirrels eyeing the feeders, too. But not yet today.

When it's a blowy day, as it has been these last couple, I am reminded of the poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, from A Child's Garden of Verses:

Whenever the moon and stars are set,

Whenever the wind is high,

All night long in the dark and wet,

A man goes riding by.
Late in the night when the fires are out,

Why does he gallop and gallop about?

Whenever the trees are crying aloud,

And ships are tossed at sea,

By, on the highway, low and loud,

By at the gallop goes he.

By at the gallop he goes, and then

By he comes back at the gallop again.

I like blowy, windy autumnal days. I haven't been in England at this time of year for a full five years now, and it is my favourite time. Not least because it is my birthday next week. September and October feels like a time of renewal to me. Perhaps that's just because of the birthday aspect, and maybe everyone feels like that around their celebratory time. But somehow I think that it's just me.

Yesterday I stood in a field with pigs and horses, found myself nuzzled by a lovely dappled rose horse. He was seventeen hands. A big boy. He smelled me up and down, checking out the scent of outdoor cat, ducks, dogs and chickens. Then he blew into the hair at the top of my head. It made me giggle. But if I had more time that afternoon, I would have stood in the open field nuzzling with this lovely spirit and enjoying the wind as it blew through the trees.