It's the time of night for nightingales. All through the year, no matter how close dawn seems, the nightingales start singing around half three in the morning. At high summer, this time of the year, it's not as disconcerting as it is in, say, December. But living on the edge of the wood means the sounds and spirits of the forest creep in all the time.
Tonight we had a songbirdcome to visit us. I do not know how she arrived in the kitchen, but she was a little song thrush, terrified and seeking refuge in any corner she could get into. In the end, it took two of us and her fear of the cat to get her back out into the wood where she belonged. She was invisible from the moment she left the lit kitchen, gone to roost and sing again tomorrow, gone to be a little piece of a great riddle.
At this time of year, full night lasts only about five and a half hours, and I have spent it all watching the forest from my window, watching the changing wind and light flow across the meadow. It is a night for long thinking. I'm not as young as I used to be, and when the forest creeps in, it gets me right in my bones. Summer is not the time to think on death, but I do, more and more often, consider that one day I will walk into the wood and just not come back. Forty-five years it's been since I first woke here, and I do not yet know who'll be there to walk with me when I go. I think the night will be longer than this, though. Mary said she felt her death coming for a decade. And all this year, I've felt those little stirrings, that wondering what it will be like, how it will feel to melt into the wood, and how I will bear to join another woman's hand to my smith and bid him goodbye for perhaps the last time.
We do not know how long a shadow we cast over the wood when we enter it for the last time. We all ask, 'Will I be remembered?' and we all hope for the answer we want to hear.
Only just shy of four in the morning, and it is already light enough to see folk on the meadow. They never sleep, or if they do it's only so their betrotheds can cheerfully take tokens from them to prove how strong the force of virginity is. I am an old woman now, but I feel just as much like dancing on that meadow this morning as I did when I first walked on to it fifty years ago. We're never ready for what happens next. The older we get, the more real the past seems, and that's true here in a way it's not in other places, I think.
The sun will burn away the dew by six, and I will let little Annie open the pub for me. And I'm sorry, my dearest, but I have no desire to dream any more tonight. I'll leave the gate latched, and I'll sleep until noon. Come downstairs and complain about my bones, I will, and then tomorrow night, tomorrow night I'll dream of you and not night birds, or death, or who will take me into the wood ten years from now. I'll shut my curtains against the meadow, I will, and I'll sleep until noon.
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