this is a world of dreams and reverie

I missed a picture from the last post. Here is the simnel cake cut.

On Monday, Jack and Jan and I all went to the Garden Center in Crowland. It was great fun. It was like how I remember Fruitbasket Flowerland being when I was little when it was a magical land instead of a ghost town.

There was a café there, where we had elevensies. I had hot chocolate and an éclair.

The hot chocolate mug was so perfect.

There was a fish store attached to the garden center. I watched a couple sweet brown-haired children get fish.

And they had a miniature railway! I was a bit distressed because I didn’t have a measuring tape. I followed the train from the other side of the fence around the outdoor plant and garden structures part but it went around the other side of the building so Jack and I went through the building, and we asked someone where it was and he told us out the front. He was cute but he didn’t look at me.

So we went out, and we found it, and the man asked me if we wanted to ride, and I said,

“Excuse me, do you know what the gauge is on this railway?”

“Seven-and-a-quarter,” he replied instantly.

“Thank you for knowing,” I said.

“Are you a railway woman?” he asked me.

“Not too much, though I like them, but my brother is a very enthusiastic railway man, and whenever he finds any size railway he always measures the tracks to find out the gauge.”

And so he told me lots of other things about the train – it’s a scale model of a British Railways class 50 – number 50031. They made 50 of them around the late 1960s-early 1970s, and the full size one is at Severn Valley Railway in Shropshire.

It was a pound to ride the train, so Jack and I both did. And I took a movie of the whole thing for Bram.

On the way out there was a box of doors. It made me happy and I went in and out of it every way except one because that door wouldn't open.

Jan and I know that the door that wouldn't open leads to somewhere else.

After we left the garden center, we went to see a really cool three-way bridge, called Trinity bridge. And I had to go over it three different ways to make it come out even.

Afterward I had to work out the correct route to go over and under it all different ways and come back to where you started. Except there was a fence in the way so you can’t do it actually. (Pout.)

Then we went to Crowland Abbey. It was everything that “Crowland Abbey” should be. I have endeavored to capture it in pictures.

The longest bell-pulls in all of England:

The picture does not capture how bright this window was:

Then when we came back, we had a very late lunch of toast-and-whatever (I had peanut butter and hummus). And I read The Horizontal Epistles of Andromeda Veal (which was hilarious) and took a nap (and so did Jan).

After I woke up it was about six o’clock but we weren’t hungry at all yet, and I wanted to go for a cycle so Jan said that I could since we’d have tea late.

I went off along Allan’s Drove. It was just starting to get dark. There was a line of tall, thin trees along one side of the road and a field on the other.

After I stopped to take a picture, I realized that it was the same road that I’d taken on one of my first trips, the one with the pond and Bleak House.

I was in a very picture-taking mood, so I stopped often.

About a mile down, I came to Chalk Road and turned right.

And found daffodils.

(This picture did not work out how I wanted to. I was struck by the way the bright daffodils looked against the brown wild sort of emptiness of the field, but I was unable to capture it in a photo.)

A little while after that, there was a large wrought-iron gate with a sign on it that said, “Loose Dog”. I assumed that this meant the same thing as other similar signs I had seen – that there was a dog loose within the confines of the gate, so watch out if you open it. However, just as I went past, a small-medium white dog squeezed underneath the gate and came rocketing out after me, barking madly. My first instinct was to pedal away as fast as ever I could, but I am not an especially fast biker and the dog was a fast runner (as dogs generally are when chasing something) so it gained on me quickly. (I also had the split second thought that I should be going back to let the people know that their dog had escaped, but that idea was rejected before I had finished thinking it.)

My next expedient was to shout behind me at it, in as ferocious and loud a voice as I could manage (which, given my current level of adrenaline, was quite ferocious and loud),

“GET away!”

Upon which, to my surprise, it promptly stopped and went back the other way.

I expect that there is some segment of the population which, upon meeting with a similar situation, would have hopped off the bike, bent down to greet the dog, exclaimed, “Oh, what a cute doggie!” and made friends with it.

I, however, am not in that segment of the population.

It was getting darker after that, so I turned right, back toward home, on the next road I came to, even though it was one I’d been on before. (I like taking as many new roads as I can.)

Having been shaken by the dog incident (yes, I know, I’m a complete fraidy-cat. I don’t typically like dogs anyhow, and I especially don’t like dogs that are barking at me, and I extra-especially don’t like dogs that are barking at me and chasing me) added just a bit of – what shall I call it? – bigness, or uncertainty, or a sense of danger, to the night. It woke up my scaredness, but in a good way. For me being afraid is either on or off - well, not all types of afraid. Not afraid like about-to-audition afraid, or my-friend-is-in-the-hospital afraid, or I-don’t-want-to-jump-off-into-the-water afraid. The imagination kind: the woods-in-the-dark kind, the home-alone-and-just-read-a-ghost-story, the House-MD-was-creepy kind, the in-the-Haunted-Mansion-alone kind. Nothing can scare me like my own imagination. And, at just the right level, it’s an extremely pleasant feeling. And once something sets it off, it stays on until circumstances completely change. But if it gets to too high a pitch, it’s very unpleasant and I get ridiculously frightened even if there’s nothing logically to be frightened of. (I am not very brave. Once I am scared, I am scared, and I am not good at fighting it. Especially if I feel like something might suddenly startle me.)

In this case, though, it was just right. Being scared by the dog had turned my spooky-mystery switch to “on,” and the night was alive with things-about-to-happen.

As I pedaled down the road and it got darker, I felt as though I heard a voice, a sort of combination of when Rothbart talks to Prince Derek (when Odette is dying) and when Ursala talks to Ariel (when she’s watching her in the bubble after she leaves the sunken ship)…

“Hurry back, little girl, hurry back…”

I saw things sometimes that I thought of taking pictures of, but I did not stop. There is a house along that road, a white one, with brightly-painted plows in the front as an odd sort of yard decoration, and I don’t like the house and I don’t know why. And I especially didn’t like it tonight. I thought of taking a picture to try to capture the eeriness of it. I started to brake, and then there was the man who lives there, in the side garden, with his big brown dog, and he said hello, and I nodded at him and pedaled on away. If it was a movie then the camera would swoosh by him with that effect where only the face is in focus.

hurry back, little girl, hurry back…

I didn’t stop until I was just inside the Gorefield sign, where the shire horses are. The black horse looked at me, so I stopped.

And he came over to the fence, and I stroked his nose, and fed him long grass from my side of the fence, and the two other horses came over and I fed them, too.

And then I went on into town.

hurry home, little girl, hurry home…

Just before I turned down St. Mark’s Road, I stopped.

“I don’t want to hurry home,” I said crossly. “I want things to happen, and it always seems like they’re going to, but nothing ever does.”

And nothing did happen, except me staring around and at the sky and someone driving by and giving me a weird look.

And I walked my bike down the road and went home. The house looked nearly as mysterious and full of significance as everything else did that night, which was satisfying. Inside, it was all golden and Jack was ironing and I sat on the floor and stretched and told them about my adventures.

Then we had dinner, which was cold lamb and mashed potatoes. And we watched an episode of Sherlock Holmes and I chatted with my mother on skype.

And then I read Pride and Prejudice and went to bed. And hugged Lumpy and watched the gap I had left in my curtains, unable to decide whether I was wishing for something to happen or dreading it.