AUTUMN DRIFTER- Bye Beatrice and Worzel

..Dandelion down, leaf on a voyage, Salmon spawn, snowflake lands gently forms tears of farewell, all quiet, all good, all gone. He spent warm days adrift in dream, as the vagabond’s hours are his alone..to choose to snooze neath a tree or mid haystack, far from the bounds of society.

In youth he’d  be seen belly down by a stream in spring when the water ran high. He’d build little boats, or oft times watch leaves, leaves with water drops hitching a ride floating by.

Spring drifters he called them as days on end he set them adrift, watch them bob and roil round the bend.    In summer when Godfrey was free as a small lad can be from school and home, feet wet with the morning dew he ran.

We rode high in the hills to the ancient standing stone. While our ponies rested in the shade below, we sought four leaf clovers for luck, wild strawberries, and dandelion tops to blow. Our summer drifters, we dreamed to, of the places we like the dandelion bits would go.

Not so much drifters, but stout of purpose, years passed, Godfrey stood on a bridge in Canada watching salmon run. Writing me all about it, a solid bridge rail to lean on. “I’m in the town of Chase wrote he, the ever roaming salmon pass under me, they are heading to spawn, I feel it to in Autumn, like the salmon that instinctive need to move on.

The winter I first knew him, we talked round the stove over hot buttered scones and coffee. He told me of his boyhood in Wales, before setting out a journey. “Winter draped it self like a damp, heavy cloak, over our valley town, out came the dreaded “Mulgrew Trousers” for me to wear when the snow came down. Those early days before the storms blew in hard, Alice my sister forgot herself, and quite undignified, joined me in chasing snowflakes about in our yard. Big, soft, slow falling winter drifters,  we’d laugh, as we caught them on brow and tongue.

Alice rubbed my face in the dirt where the beets grew…long ago when we were young.

In that silent hour just at eve, as the first flakes fell and street lights fluttered on. My Autumn Drifter’s deep in my turquoise chair, adrift in stories, coffee and hot buttered scone…