March 27th. Return.

Returned from a two week stay in England. The grass appears to have grown enormously and for the first few days back I felt like a real stranger again. Not that I didn't want to get back. I had arrived in Britain during storms and an arctic chill. Plastic bags decorated the bleak trees and verges, signage had sprung up and through, like the council knew it was supposed to be spring. Friday and Saturday evenings still sprouted their bunches of lurching blobs; a gross animus pervades. Is this just me?

Yet on return to the mountains I know that I will never be truly at home here, that the traces, signs, faces and features do not share my recent history, that I am a visitor, an escapee from the shades and clouds that drove me here to focus inwards and to the land that might give me motive and sort me out.