there is just this

Last night, driving through paradise, across the moor in the late dusk, each tor and hill behind me wearing a thinner veil of pink: Mis Tor, Staple Tor, the hill bordering the Tavy, then the first hill in Cornwall by the Tamar, then tor after tor of Bodmin (Rough Tor, Brown Willy) until they have paled to a blur of land and sky over the coast, terrestrial and celestial indistinguishable; air so thick and rich with summer even my clothes through the open windows surely scented with it. Behind me, my father's fading like the light; but still we can laugh, still we can walk in the garden.

I remember that other July, after my father's stroke, my mum's diagnosis, when consolation came in the dawn beach-walks, the crosscountry drive back West at dusk by haymeadows, cornfields; the blue body of the moor rising from the green and gold seas.

I sit out under the night with its small appearances – the scuffle in the bank, the first pipistrelle, moths like stars – and watch how the darkening sky draws everything to it, and then I am part of night in a way I can't be part of day, try as I might.

Then this morning, the horses nose-to-tail under the hedgerows' lattice of fly-loud light and the good warm smell of horse, and my feet on the hayfield stubble bare and massaged. I lie back on the short growth of grass, clover, thistle, stubblestalks of dock, dog sprawled close; I make a five-point star under the blue, and the buzzloud thoughts drop away. Gone my losses and pain, my anxieties for our poor degraded world, poor doomed species, my fear, my striving.

There is just this: me and the good earth, my cells pressed to her pulse, my first and most enduring relationship. I am part of her, she of me. I lie here and know that despite everything life is good, life is blessed, I am home.