Today clouds caught in the hedgerows, and we packed honey sandwiches to eat in the silence.

But we forgot; it is, in fact, April.

So the clouds taste of almonds

and there is no silence.

The smooth white world is loud.

It starts as a trick to escape. Breakfast in the mist! Get the two small bodies out into the damp world before the drowse of another boxed-in day sets in. Legs are slow and voices high. The ground is so sodden that we slide and sink with every step. We move haltingly, grudgingly, from bench to stile to gate.

We pause at each. Nibbling.

Getting quieter.

Matching the softness of the air.

We stare out into nothing. No sea. No fields. No sky. Just a bone-white endlessness fringed with blackthorn. Blackthorn so heavy with blossom that it shifts in and out of focus like a magic painting, hiding in plain sight.

We head up onto the lane that walks the edge of the world. Solid under foot and far away from everyone.

Long Legs darts ahead— he does that a lot—I watch the mist sway close on his heel, swallowing him. He has heard it. He wants to be alone in the uproar.

So much easier to feel it that way. Being the one point of motion in a world of noise.

I raise a finger to my lips and Little Legs pauses for breath.

In a cocoon of hedgerow, tarmac and nothingness, we sway against sound. It is not a wall. It is liquid, me move through it. The gulls and jackdaws— sulking in ridged fields waiting for the sky to return—moan against our bodies, grazing skin. Two wood pigeons, unsure of themselves in the whiteness, politely bounce questions into the lane.

Nothing moves without us. We cast ripples— reflected telephone wires slither like adders along the shining tarmac.

We feel the song of the blackbird like silk against our shoulders; and a lone robin, hidden beyond the edge of everything, showers us with sound, cold and fast. A great tit rocks us back and forth. Little Legs swings in time.

But the more you listen…

—like stars in a desert, or naked dandelions bending—

… between the tactile sounds, above them all— too light to touch the ground— are the shivering songs. These are the larks, dunnocks, chaffinches, whitethroats, and a million birds I cannot name, and perhaps (very much perhaps) a waxwing.

The world has disappeared. The chorus is invisible. So, we can dream them all. I dream a waxwing.

Long Legs waits for us beneath the sycamore trees.

Tight bright leaves cup white into silver and giant drops of mist fall onto our sandwiches.

There is another row of trees just visible below us. They have no colour. No buds that we can see. The world is bleached. Sucked clean by a mist tide, leaving only shape and sound.

The trees are long-fingered, charcoal black; and behind them, more nothing.

We eat wet bread and stare at nothing. The branches above us shift, heaving their shoulders and shaking off the clinging water. It hammers down around us in a percussive crash and for a second the world is silenced.

Then a Chiffchaff opens its throat and swallows the stillness.

Long Legs lopes off— having been fed—desperate to dive into the nothing once again.

I watch him  fade into the white noise of spring.