Tree by river

Tree or trees? One limb broken. The grey path reflects the grey sky. Water rushes down the river, brown and muddy. In speight, almost overcoming the banks. The rain is trapped on the pathways, the grass sodden and squelchy. I walked along there this afternoon as part of a long walk. I can feel the wet mud between my toes overtopping my shoes, pulling at their soles. Water is like glue. Stronger than gravity. My feet lift out of the shoes as they lift from the ground. My feet still feel cold and are aching hours afterwards. Perhaps I need a bowl of hot water to soak them in. I wish I’d got some bathsalts! Time to rest.

Tree

This is where we walked today, up the hill, across the valley of the Trent. Part of the city laid out across the view. We are a long but thin city. Countryside all around us. A lot of green spaces despite the terraces. Not huge and grey like Manchester and Birmingham. Yes we get traffic jams and pollution, our infrastructure is poor, with many bottlenecks for cars and lorries, particularly when the nearby motorway gets blocked and all its traffic hits the cities dual carriage ways. Then again we can be completely blocked up by snowfalls. Ah well, that’s life…. The tree looks out over all of that and just ignores it and carries on growing…