A Sunday Stroll
She always preferred to gather flowers early. In the beauty of dawn, there was a chill to the air that clung to her skin and raised the hairs on her arms and legs. Dew on the tall stalks of grass dampened her shoes as she stepped carefully along an overgrown path through the large meadow near her home. You couldn't see the path through the grass, but she knew it was there. In the distance was a wall of trees, maple in the prime of summer, their leaves dancing and stretching for the brightening sky above. The shadows beneath, between thick trunks that she suspected were many hundreds of years older than herself, called to her, inviting her into the coolness. She could smell the moss that made a patchwork quilt on the earth. The meadow hummed with grasshoppers that made death-defying leaps from branch to branch, careless if they reached their destination, and larks dipped toward her in the sky before pealing away with calls to their companions. They danced around her in a wide halo, straying to the trees but always returning. She would have thought it was deliberate, if such a thing were possible. If she let her eyes lose focus, it seemed she was part of the meadow, swaying in the breeze and soaking in the rising sun. She bent to cup a small flower in her hand. How had primrose managed to take over the whole area? Her hand travelled down the stem, with a mind to pluck some flowers and weave them into her hair. She could make a small crown, something to wear as she worked on her garden later.
