There are places and times in life you can only look back on and wonder: Did I really live there? Were those truly the things I saw? The Halt—more specifically, Hacheston Halt—or even more fully, the slow, heaving countryside that stretches into the Water Meadows between Hacheston and Marlesford, on the very edge of Suffolk’s sandlings, is one such place. With the eyes of a decade gone by, this is its tale.
January
On Owls.
A Barn Owl. Tyto Alba. An owl, the owl.
Great Weshimulo, ghost of the woods, who after a year’s abeyance steps back into the water meadows as if he’s never been away, instantly making the world whole by nothing more than the sight of two majestic oars sculling against dusk.
The owl a strange light caught in the corner of your eye. Like something you are not sure you should tell of, in case nobody believes you of what you saw.
A vision of the unreal, unfurling.
A face so full of adoration that it has become its own heart.
The white wings so long they seem to reach beyond time.
A charm.
A blessing.
A magical incantation of a bird, talisman of meadows and totem against the absence of days to come. Mesmeric master of the invisible space that lies like an imaginary island between land and sky.
An enthralment so captivating that everything else today becomes but a frame by which to measure the beauty of the owl. Life but a witness, born to say, “the owl is true.”
The slick of a black plastic bag that hangs tumorous in the branches of the row on hollow lane.
The thirty-seven bare beach trees standing in a line. Their last remaining leaves shimmering like bronzed strands in a King’s carpets weave.
A brook that breaks the silence as it talks in hushed, conspiratorially tones of how it searches endlessly for the sea.
The moon, out of place in the blue sky, that sits like a child on the stairs up to late at her parents party, like the man who suddenly finds himself on the wrong bus going to the wrong town.
The frost that tops the leaves and steals the heat from the shade of the lane.
A dead rabbit on the roadside, its eyes clean gone, buttons popped from a coat; cherries stolen from the top of an iced bun.
Seen today: An Owl. The Moon, Some Snowdrops.
Truth Street 