I arose to gentle rain, the dark gusting wind that stirred the sleep was finally tormenting another. A refreshing splash shocked the warmth of night from my face, I longed to be out and together with the elemental forces.The road to town was as uneventful as the lives of the people using it. They seemed to have some kind of purpose, yet I found only a detachment, unable to discern a common bond.
Walking up the worn steps to the twin horned place of worship, I knew the sun had risen somewhere nearby, behind an impenetrable bank of dirty edgeless cloud, as the shadows had begun to recede, and those furtive cobbled alleys changed magically to bright comforting emporiums, offering glittering prizes to glittering people. Moving down to the lake, the rain returned in random, gusting squalls, sometimes from the lake, sometimes from the mountains. Separated by a stillness broken only by the murmur of the faithful, and the persistent dogmatic ringing at their destination.
The occasional intrusion of modern transport is gratefully countered by the ragged squabble of water birds in their incessant search for sustenance.
If there was to be a destination later this day, I saw it then. That illogical diagonal wooden path serving to confound yet paradoxically please the eye.
The warm steamy glow of the bistro intervened and beckoned with a siren song of respite from the horizontal rain, across a sea of umbrellas, promising large frothy bowls of coffee. After all is said and done, it is the journey that is as much anticipated pleasure, as the destination itself.
The sudden loud brightness, the aroma of coffee and the fog of tobacco smoke seemed to enrich the human noise to form a billowing cloud of resistance to entry.
The exit some time later, being a return to relative tranquillity as the door slammed shut behind. A moments pause, and a step forwards.
Drizzle had replaced the irregular habit of earlier, offering a damp blanket of muted silence. A few more steps, a corner turned, and there again the wooden structure of the bridge.
This ancient covered walkway with its intriguing devices witnessed over six hundred summers, countless passions for countless reasons. The ghosts of the bridge called to me, I wept. Laughter echoed around the wooden framework, laughter as soft as the down on the swans below. Enchanted by haunting deep thoughts, I became lost to time or reason. I wept again.
The faces of bigotry mocked from above, their subjects long returned to the dust from whence they came, these faces a counterpoint to the beauty below, a reminder of times gone by. It can never be the same again.
The lurch back to normality, here and now, by the collision with emissaries form distant lands, left a fleeting, haunting glimpse of time, encapsulated, to be examined and nurtured in quiet contemplative moments.
Across the bridge, in a dance recognised by all who have felt bitter coldness, a solitary, optimistic fisherman breathes warmth into his hands while he stamps his feet. His breath forming billowing clouds of vapour around him, a cloud not a person.
Over the bridge along, and up the steps where the French cuisine kisses the fake Picasso, dashing past the countless watches, diamonds and ego’s, the feeling of chasing a dream, walking faster to retain the moment, to hold the sparkling moment, a surge of emotion races, tantalizingly touchable but it dissipates as the fisherman’s billowing steamy breath, to nothing, it is past, the feelings gradually sink back to the mundane. The memory as faded as the taste of last summers fruit.
Copyright © 1999 Roger Grice – all rights reserved
