Winter’s Calling

Late November, the dark peak.

Winter is home again on these high moors,

mewling in with chill-lash days of sleet and gale.

With fellhard testing days of hail obscured horizons and roaring, bed broaching brooks.

The moorlands, in summer sunbaked hard to a dustpuffing footthumping crust, hard as the skin-shredding gritstone;

air filled with skylark song.

Now, now they are become the haunt of ravens.

Now, winter drenched they have become again a crazy patchwork,

a patchwork of dampslick gritstone and foot chilling mud.

The sharp bite of ice,

its grip freezing the mud to iron hardness, the dampslick to glass;

that is yet to come.

With climate change it may not come at all this year. 

My body, fresh off the bus, shrugs a familiar desultory shiver. On these fells, bare weeks ago, weather warmed it welcomed the gentle kiss of a cooling breeze. This winter day, warmth barely conserved by swathes of fleece and shell, the intrusively questing tendrils of a nithering east wind find any gap; to chill any sliver of bare skin. 

But still, these long beloved rolling seas,

of heather speckled with islands of gritstone all beneath a sheltering sky,

 still they call me.

And so, as I have for decades, I respond.

With coldtingle scorched fingers and toes, with wind chapped grin, I run. 

And, for a little while, all is well and all manner of things are well.