The End Of November

It's raining, in the dark night. It's the lovely, cleansing, endless rain of the end of November, relentless and windswept. All the gunk and residue of the remains of Summer are being cleaned away, to leave the stark landscape that will see us through Winter. The rain, is magnificent, and continues.

It has been raining for weeks now. The Sun is a long distant memory, and rarely seen even on clear days as the daylight hours reduce in number to less than eight each day. It's like a whole other world, a fantastical other dimension that takes over in the Winter months. Outside my window, it is pitch black and spookily cold, with whistling winds and a squelch under foot. Sometimes, strange noises come from the obscurity, or is that just the imagination, taunting and teasing?

Oh, the gloom of the unknown. It might very well be exactly the same landscape outside now, as it was before, but how are we to tell? That garden, spacious and luxurious as it is, could be home to all kinds of unknowable things in the dark, the dark that has scared me all my life. (Continuing the theme of this author being a scaredy-cat, it is time to reveal that the dark is one of those primal fears not to be overruled.) Even in the dusk, and walking along a well-travelled trail, the pace quickens at the thought of all the cliched horrors that might be lurking, and a walk along a pavement in the dark becomes an ordeal beyond all measure. Even now, the memory of all those sleeps under the protective night light is reassuring, even though the night light itself is also but a memory.

Why be scared of the dark? It's really nothing taken by itself, an absence of light, but we have thought of it throughout time as the time when things go bump in the night, when the spooks come out to play, and things go missing, never to be seen again... Mwahahahahahah. The night time is scary, whether in town or in country. Maybe it's 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band', and its influence on the developing mind, and all the other myths and tales lodged in the collective unconscious...

Have a nice night out there, and don't forget to avoid the bump in the night...

O.