Commencing Countdown

So she pondered whilst laying in the middle of a field. The grass was just long enough that unless anyone was 5 or less feet away from her would not be able to make out her form lying supine, staring up at the clouds as they wandered reminiscently across the azure sky. She surveyed the expanse above her, incorporating the rays of the sun into her skin and warming to their touch. It had been a dark, thick, snow ridden season in which it had been impossible to get warm but as the heat of daylight began to take precedence over the cool of the night, she found the strength to get up from her quilt-laden cot to venture outside. The first steps into nature were biting and gelid but with increased moments spent outside, she began to coax the sun to come out.

And there she had sat, the middle of her porch, regarding the icy stretch before her slowly fragment until it was only a tracing of sloppy puddles on the asphalt. As the days continued, the puddles slowly and defeatedly began to shrink in size, starting out large forces of water but as the sun hit them, they skirmished until the water began to lose the territory.

With the air beginning to preheat for the summer, day after day, she would pull a blanket around her shoulders, venture out into the back pasture and spread it in a soft divot in the ground. It was here that she would push the material to fill the hollow and crawl onto it. She would spend hours on the mossy diry, lost to her thoughts and prayers while insects and birds flashed overhead, the only sound to her reverie.

And as she regarded her favourite place in a calm daydream, the forces inside her had began to fight just like the heat and wet. Over the years it had accelerated from the starting moments when her hair was soft and sandy to the present ages of coarse and charcoal. She had more difficulty situating herself on the blanket, but the agility of the mind defeated the freezing joints of the body. But these things inside of her, she was always able to identify.

One particular day she lay there, heat of the star above seeping into her clothes, warming her skin underneath. She saw birds far overhead, heard the drone of bees busily working on the field’s flowers, smelt the warm, heady scent of soil beneath her fabric. She could taste the sweetness of the air as it drifted through the grass stalks, that covered her body. Her favourite place had held the memories, the moments, the meandering thoughts and she had taken it to her soul. She had moved with it, having it etched into her being.

She closed her wrinkling eyes. She sighed. And the light left her body.