How lucky country children are in these natural delights that lie ready to their hand! Every season and every plant offers changing joys. As they meander along the lane that leads to our school all kinds of natural toys present themselves for their diversion. The seedpods of stitchwort hang ready for delightful popping between thumb and finger, and later the bladder campion offers a larger, if less crisp, globe to burst. In the autumn, acorns, beechnuts, and conkers bedizen their path, with all their manifold possibilities of fun. In the summer, there is an assortment of honeys to be sucked from bindweed flowers, held fragile and fragrant to hungry lips, and the tiny funnels of honeysuckle and clover blossoms to taste.
Miss ReadTag: children nature seasons country plants biophilia countryside
Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.
Neil GaimanTag: chicago city suburbs countryside migraine
Élodie, who was rising fifteen, lifted her anaemic, puffy, virginal face with its wispy hair; she was so thin-blooded that good country air seemed only to make her more sickly.
Émile ZolaTag: country countryside sickly terre
We move, all of us, in sprung rhythm: for our world – whether we conceive it as broad or as cosy – is, not to out-Manley Fr Hopkins, as ringèd and streakèd and specklèd as the cattle of Laban.
G.M.W. WemyssTag: time country-life village-life countryside
In East Sussex, let us say, an old farm sleeps in sun-dapple, its oast-house with its cowls echoing the distant steeple of SS Andrew and Mary, Fletching, where de Montfort had prayed and Gibbon now sleeps out a sceptic’s eternity. The Sussex Weald is quiet now, its bows and bowmen that did affright the air at Agincourt long dust. A Chalk Hill Blue spreads peaceable wings upon the hedge. Easter is long sped, yet yellow and lavender yet ornament the land, in betony and dyer’s greenweed and mallows. An inquisitive whitethroat, rejoicing in man’s long opening of the Wealden country, trills jauntily from atop a wall.
G.M.W. WemyssTag: birds country-life countryside east-sussex
Arcady, like Death its denizen with us, is all around us, if we – stalled beasts who want to be set forth – but see it. Forth, then, with Dan Geoffrey upon the heye wey:
Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stal!
Know thy contree, look up, thank God of all;
Hold the heye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede;
And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede.
Tag: country-life countryside
I saw a pair of great tits some days ago. (Massingham Major, you are a dirty-minded boy, and if you snigger again, you will do five hundred lines.) The squeaking-wheel song of Parus major is always gladsome, a precursor to interesting scenes at the bird table. On this occasion, however, what hearing and seeing the two greenery-yallery Paridæ first called up in me was a memory from last year’s early Springtide: an ærial near-collision. A very young squirrel – native red, I am rejoiced to say – was leaping from one tree trunk to another, adjacent, just as a great tit was exploding outwards in flight from the second tree. You never saw a more indignant bird or a more startled squirrel in your life.
G.M.W. WemyssTag: birds country-life countryside
When does the year begin? Well: that rather depends: on who you are, and where. The Church kalendar – like the academic, which is hewn of the ecclesiastical – begins after the harvest-tide, with Advent, a time of preparation, light kindling and shining forth even as darkness gathers. The countryman’s calendar is governed by the rhythms of the earth, of sowing and of harvest. The angler’s year, the shooting man’s, the hunter’s, all these are in the disposition of God – or Nature, if you fancy yourself allergic to God – even as is the countryman’s.
G.M.W. WemyssTag: time country-life countryside
Or awa’ upon Islay, in January, the wind was honed to a cutting edge across the queer flatness of Loch Gorm and the strand and fields ’round. The roe deer had taken shelter in good time and the brown trout had sought deeper waters. An auld ram alone huddled against the wind, that had swept clear the skies even of eagle, windcuffer, and goose. The scent of saltwater rode the wind over the freshwater loch, and the dry field-grasses rattled, and there was the memory of peat upon the air: a whisky wind in Islay. The River Leòig was forced back upon itself as the wind whipped the loch to whitecaps; only the cairn and the Standing Stones stood unyielding in the blast as of old.
G.M.W. WemyssTag: birds country-life countryside islay
For the author as for God, standing outwith his creation, all times are one; all times are now. In mine own country, we accept as due and right – as very meet, right, and our bounden duty – the downs and their orchids and butterflies, the woods and coppices, ash, beech, oak, and field maple, rowan, wild cherry, holly, and hazel, bluebells in their season and willow, alder, and poplar in the wetter ground. We accept as proper and unremarkable the badger and the squirrel, the roe deer and the rabbit, the fox and the pheasant, as the companions of our walks and days. We remark with pleasure, yet take as granted, the hedgerow and the garden, the riot of snowdrops, primroses, and cowslips, the bright flash of kingfishers, the dart of swallows and the peaceful homeliness of house martins, the soft nocturnal glimmer of glow worm and the silent nocturnal swoop of owl.
G.M.W. WemyssTag: birds country-life village-life countryside
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