I’m trying to describe the landscape towards home, but nothing comes out of it. The setting sun, which only a minute ago was obscured by the last protuberances of a monotonous dark grey cloud covering a quarter of the sky, now boldly pushes it away like a cotton blanket. The cross that it erects in front of me when I squint my eyes obscures the view of the large clumps of soil wrought by tractor wheels in the ploughed field. I wanted to record in words the disintegration of form at the hands of nature.
On the other side, an equally large gray cloud made of more delicate zigzags swirls over the forest under the force of a strong wind. A touch of silver had been mixed into the blue of the sky before the sun’s triumph, which had made this part of the firmament look so heavy that it seemed to have eaten away the detached branches of the few treetops rising above the forest mass, leaving the bite marks visible. Now the sky is yellowish-blue without any depth.
What was lost with the change of decor is made up for by the suddenly yellowing rye field. The crop has already been cut. The setting sun hangs low, casting a warm glow on the straw bushes cut to the length of a child’s finger.
The wind is strong. The rain cloud that covered the sun half an hour ago has disintegrated into greyish-pink knobs galloping like horses, with the upper body and forelegs in the air, together with the wind, away from the sun, to welcome the night. A lone black crow is about to land on an elongated mound of earth, one end overgrown with grass, a few dozen meters away from me, but flies away just when it notices that I am observing it.
There is a large depression in the field, most of which is covered by clean soil with weeds or small isolated patches of grass, and in the middle of which there is a puddle in the shape of a serpentine, conjuring up an image of a small historical lake. The surface of the puddle was silvery-grey only a few minutes ago, then became dull, but now, with the sun fully behind the horizon, it is almost as purplish-pink as the sky above it.
August 2016