The morning after Christmas
Exploring the inspiring quietude of the Boxing Day morning in the countryside
The day after Christmas is, in a way, like a New Year’s Day — quiet and deserted. At least, in the countryside. No shops to walk about, no parks or playgrounds. Maybe a car would pass us by, but hardly a pedestrian or a jogger. Not on a frosty morning like this.
I take my dog out for a walk for the first time in months, seizing the opportunity of a dry morning. There is no guarantee it will persist into a dry day. And I miss walking. I walked so much during the summer, but with the weather getting progressively worse over the course of August, my walks ceased to exist. The washout continued into the autumn and hardly ever stopped in winter.
Today is beautiful. Drop-dead gorgeous I would say if the day was a person. The dirt road to the river behind my house lies over the bogs with heather and gorse bushes on both sides. It’s not a long way but I’ve never done the entire walk and only seen the river once, when my husband and I, two naive, unassuming minds, decided to take a trip down that narrow road in a car. And then drove in reverse gear for 1.5km until we made it out.
In summer, the road is swarming with insects, which find the luscious green landscape as mesmerising as I do. Midges and ticks, in particular, make it almost impossible to walk to the river. But in the bareness of winter it seems uninhabited, so I brave the entire walk.
The winter sun is mild on the cold sky, which looks pale and barely blue on the south and has deeper, richer tones on the north, where the clouds are still dark and dusty — the sun is not yet high enough to banish them to the other side of the world. But I enjoy this contrast. I’ve always been a person of conflicting opposites, so this duality of the sky is me — the light learning to coexist with the darkness.
I straggle down the road. The grass, cut down and straw-yellow, crunches under the soles of my boots. The heather in the bogs, usually bright purple in the summer, now turned into a purple haze, altered by a light dusting of the winter essence. The prickly tops of the gorse look white, as if they were dipped ever so slightly into a can of thin white paint. The air smells fresh and clean. The dog leaps happily down the road, tongue hanging to the side, and I feel my steps become quicker and larger, the rough terrain giving me a bounce.
We reach the river. Despite the rain, it is surprisingly within its bounds. So close and yet so far away, I feel like I can reach it with my hand but know for a fact that it would take another 10 minutes to walk through the marsh, if I were to climb over the fence. But I stay on this side of the fence and just marvel at the beauty and stillness of the winter river. My eyes drink in the fog that hovers just above the water in little patches of mist.
It’s quiet, not even a sound of water. But then a swirling flock of birds swoops low above the river, their anxious chirps sweet and lilting. The ducks quack in the marshes. I feel like I’m intruding on something not meant to be witnessed by a human. A secret ritual of nature that I may not disturb. I take a photo of the river, even though the camera can’t capture what I see, and then turn back towards the house.
The sky looks brighter on the way back. The sun rose higher and is now scratching the tops of the gorse bushes. A spotty blue stripe of a cloud below the sun shape-shifts as I walk, resembling the bird formation I have observed by the river. The noise from airplanes takes us by surprise. Their contrails dissect the sky, drawing white irregular polygons on the blue paper, the angles of which I cannot calculate.
The smoke from a chimney fills the air and I know that we are almost home. The dog looks tired and is no longer sprinting. My legs are tingling from the cold air and exercise. My mind is swelling with inspiration, its wings beating against the tight cage of my skull, anxious to break free and spill onto a paper.
If there was just one thing that I could do every day apart from writing, it would be walking down the country roads. There’s just so much to see.
~ Lana Taylor
26 Dec 2023
All those adjectives just made it an abundant read.