The Morning it Started

His booted feet covered the dew-covered grass of the empty field until he reached the well-worn wooden bridge. The creek below was slightly swollen and the thick air around him hung low, promising  to entrap anything in its grasp. The smell of mud was strong around him, but the white gravel on the main road protected him from sinking too deep into it.

He continued off the main pebble-covered path to another bridge, this one covered by vines from nearby trees and adorned with plaid red and blue ribbons and bells. Here in the glen the trees were thicker, but so was the mud.

On his left, a wooden deck and roof covered the picnic table at which he had eating so many hot meals. The table was already covered in blue woolen plaid, signaling the human life that was beginning to inhabit the area. The dew covered spiderwebs, tentative butterflies and smell of horse droppings from over the hill behind the kitchen signaled other forms of life long established.

His feet walked beyond the fence adorned with flags and blankets, still heavy and sodden from the recent rain to the space behind it. She was already back there, bent over her black crate of supplies. Her blond head bobbed up and he could see a tantalizing strap of purple under her shapeless peasant blouse. She smiled briefly at him and then resumed digging. He walked to the table beside her, past the cluttered assortment of buckets and plastic contained to his right. The treed hill beside them them was alive with animal rousing and emerging morning sunlight reflected off the beads of water still clinging to the leaves.

She raised up, smiling, and handed him an applesauce jar filled with four fingers of amber liquid. “You know what this is,” she said to him, smiling, and he twisted the lid, smiling back.

*Writing 101, Day 2