Perfect Day

It is a perfect day outside today. There is an autumn sun that isn't fierce but still warms, a breeze that carries a warning of winter but for now cools and makes the leaves rustle and a blue sky that speaks of clarity and joy. I love days like this - when I used to live out in the country this would a day for taking the dogs and some bags and going foraging for blackberries and sloes for several hours, coming back scratched and stained with purple berry juice, the dogs tired and happy and that feeling of being at one with the season that only autumn really allows.

In America this is the Fall - when the leaves turn and the post lapsarian wilderness  is at its most beautiful. I remember going camping with Jon and Angus - right the way up through Wisconsin to the Canadian border and the Voyageurs National Park. It was cold but the lakes were breathtaking in their autumn splendour and, for me, the whole trip was made worthwhile by seeing a large bear lumbering through the forest. When we got back to Eau Claire we discovered that three campers not a mile from us had been killed that weekend - by a bear! It served to make us realise that the wilderness in the USA is just that  - not some theme park for a weekend jolly.

I love wild places - their mystery and romance and I loved living on the edge of nowhere. Odd, considering my formative years were spent in one of the most densely populated cities on earth But the thing about Calcutta was that you were only ever a few hour's car ride from country - paddy fields and villlages a million miles and a hundred years removed from the city. Gail and I used to imagine we would have a little house out near Dum Dum. There would be fields for  her horses and I would have a flock of goats and chickens. How strange that she now has a farm and I, for a brief period, had the chickens and the yard to rear them. I had forgotten about it until I started to write this and then the memory came flooding back.

We would sit under the trees at Tolly and plan  our adult lived incessantly. They always were presupposed to be in India - we both loved it so. And it must have been on cold weather days because the memory comes complete with that cold weather sky - the same colour as it is here today and the same whisper in the trees that I hear outside the window now.

My friend Roshni has gone home - to see her father who is not very well - and I was suffused with jealousy. She is there now as I write and I envy her so. But you  know, it may  be better to keep my  Calcutta in my head - a place of the soul and heart rather than destroy it with reality. I am not a fan of reality at the moment.