the way through the woods

in houses i have lived in - sometimes set on the edge of town - the town has eventually grown and overshot my home. what was once the edge of town has become middle suburbia. where once i could bike to the fields and watch the sun set. is now a carefully manicured, precisely organized curving street-formed range of houses.

happily, at this moment i am one hundred metres from farmland. the same distance from woodland.

kipling knew this same quandary - how to live amongst his kind whilst also being available to the countryside?

"autumn path through the woods" camille pissaro

weather and rain have undone it again,
and now you would never know
there was once a road through the woods
before they planted the trees.
it is underneath the coppice and heath,
and the thin anemones.
only the keeper sees
that, where the ring-dove broods,
and the badgers roll at ease,
there was once a road through the woods.
"lane near a small town" sisley

yet, if you enter the woods
of a summer evening late,
when the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
where the otter whistles his mate,
(they fear not men in the woods,
because they see so few)
you will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
and the swish of a skirt in the dew,
steadily cantering through
the misty solitudes,
as though they perfectly knew
the old lost road through the woods . . . .
but there is no road through the woods.



excerpted from "the way through the woods"
rudyard kipling