Today we wake to a curtain of rain. It suits me. It keeps the world at bay. It falls like a protective cover, raising steaming fog from the ground, and I dream of our house and garden, like a castle in the clouds. Floating away from the world, inaccessible, our home is a warm glow in the mist.
I know today is a good day to go for a walk. Other people, even other people with dogs, are fair weather walkers and we will have the fields to ourselves.
Later the sky clears a little and I open the garden door. You lift an ear and get back to the business of resting. I leave the door open anyway. As I sit at my desk, a robin flies in and sits atop a branch in my house plant. He takes one curious look at me and flies back out again. I feel a hot spark of happiness and wonder if it is a message from a loved one. I think again and realise it is time for me to fill the bird feeders. Come on my boy, let’s go out and feed the birds. A few ducks are pecking at fallen apples in the garden, and I feel pleased that you don’t chase them away. You find interesting scents to investigate on the other side of the garden, and all of us cohabit happily for a while.
I spend the rest of the day occasionally looking up from my desk to watch busy squirrels, emptying the feeders faster than the whole migratory clan could manage. I will have to buy more seeds.
Today is just an ordinary day, mostly full of ordinary things. But magic still underscores the mundane. The magic of a moment in time when a bird comes to ask for seeds; a bright second like a shooting star . And the magic of us, the Milky Way of our shared existence. Full of moments that would mean nothing, except that they could so easily have not come to pass. What an extraordinary story we have. How did I come to meet an old carpathian shepherd cross nearly 2000 miles away? It is our bedtime story. It feels so right, it must be written up there somewhere, where stars wink at us.