Keen green rain

Grey-headed clouds like elders of the sky. The steel-blue, and silver etching lines of the drizzle, and everywhere a bubbling and exuberance of spring green. The green hill, with its pattern of irregularly posed sheep, was so steep that the view from the cottage made it seem two-dimensional—a wall, or a sheet, standing straight up. The small whinnying and bleating of the sheep bounced from this backdrop as if from a sounding board. It came over the valley like the wailing of children. Odd to reflect how easily the human mind turns all this fertility to sorrow: the keening of the sheep, the green, the rain.