Snow-white Sowerby Bridge geese are mooching about
Spring time in England, and the snow has fallen. Calderdale is no exception, and in my corner of snowy Sowerby Bridge it has settled on the hills.
The dawn skies have been a tepid blue, lending the landscape before my window a gelid essence, more like midwinter than the start of spring. Even the dawn chorus has been short lived and subdued. But on the street this bracing morning, there are birds a-plenty.
A crow swoops past my window, bound for its nest on the roof, while in the bushes a female blackbird roots for breakfast.
Soon it is all but jumping down the street. As I leave my door, the bouncing blackbird greets me in a jaunty jive of tapdancing and tweets.
The snow-white Sowerby Bridge geese are mooching about around the nooks and crannies of the bank, where they have nested, one sitting in a cleared hollow, two others patrolling like ungainly guards, waddling their web-footed ways over the twiggy bank.
At the station, bluetits brighten leafless trees, or swing by the feeders, pretty birds only less remarked on because they’re so familiar. But the presence of these fluttering blue jewels is a joy, testifying to the efforts of volunteers who tend the station’s garden.
At this time of year, long tail tits, coal tits, dunnocks, sparrows, wrens, flit and skitter between the newly budding bushes, and I keep an eye peeled for them as I await my train.
On board, I watch the fields between Sowerby Bridge and Copley drifting by, swathed in sunlit snow like Arctic deserts, flecked in specks of stone or fallen branches, dark veins riddling seas of white.
Outside Brighouse, humps of earth are lathered in it, chequered dunes of brilliant white and bitty black, while on the station platform it glitters like satin, only loosening into sludge at the point where it is trudged through by shoes and boots.
The next morning, I am on a train again. Rain fell in the night, and much of the snow has melted. The view from the viaduct is of wide fields, a cricket pitch, a denuded tree bent over by some long-ago storm and now lying almost horizontal, a crooked crown of dark brown branches clawing the morning air like the twisted fingers of a fallen god.