Purple light and snakeskin…

Life’s an adventure, a walk along a path that twists and turns as it leads off in this direction and that, light and shade, darkness and sunshine. Sometimes it’s hard to see very much at all, other times everything is illuminated in a flash of brilliance so bright that it might almost blinds you.

I was wandering through a tangle of trees and bushes last week trying to avoid the blood bringing brambles, looking for hazelnuts and anything else that I might stumble across.

It was dark in the trees, the moss and last years leaves beneath my feet spongy. As I looked up a flash of sunlight hit the trees above my head, sending my eyes to purple-lighted blindness – and with it I stepped back into a memory of boyhood.

I used to ramble like this a lot, almost daily, after school and weekends, holidays and high days, all weathers, on my own or with my friends, mile after mile, across the fields and through the water meadows, up the hill and down into the coolness of the dips, into the trees and under the bushes, always looking, always learning, taking in everything that I saw in that way that only small boys seem to be able to do.

It must have been safer back then. I was allowed to wander from seven years onwards, out at eight and back by seven, on schooldays out straight after lessons, then home by six.

Watching the steam trains leave the station, waiting for the owl to fly from its hole, lifting the fallen log to see the family of mice beneath – the mother all bared teeth and squeaks. Once I saw a lightning bolt hit a tree, not setting it on fire but shearing off a massive bough. Another time I watched a swan chase a dog into a ditch where it lay cowering long after the bird had gone. I watched the red moon and the blue, the rutting stag and the darting weasel, and the adders basking in the sunny sand along the lane – dozens of them large and long and lazy. I didn’t get too close, adder bites were deadly, two or three and you’d be a goner.

I remember picking ladies slipper for my mum and coming across a single blue corncrake bloom by a stream. I remember eating beech nuts, hazel nuts, hot sweet chestnuts baked over a daylight campfire in a tin can - apples, blackberries, wild strawberries, a baked trout pierced through with a stick, although it could have been a roach for all I knew.

Exploring days of long ago, life’s adventure just begun. No fear of the road or where it may turn. Light, shade, darkness, and sunshine all the same. Well, it was safer back then.

And then my eyes focussed once more, the sunshine gone, snatching my boyhood memories with it.

Stepping out of the trees and onto the hard-top of the lane I looked down at my feet. A length of blue-green lay on the road. An adder, its yellow head flattened beneath a flattened body. Its red-orange innards squashed around it as if it’d been outlined by a child with a box of crayons, a cartoon of a snake and no more deadly than a child’s drawing.

Yes, life’s an adventure, a walk along a path that twists and turns as it leads off in this direction and that, light and shade, darkness and sunshine – and if you are unlucky a messy ending.