February

We are moved and so we are living in a madness of boxes and books and clothes and dismantlings; but slowly we are getting on top of things.  It is strange, the things that do not appear.  

It snowed a lot two days ago and is snowing again now.  I can see up the old drovers' road into the beech woods, the steep hill covered in snow, the trees bare and grey-brown against the ground.  A fine, powdery snow, layer upon layer, until as now it is about five inches thick.

Yesterday I drove to Welshpool on the open A-roads, not risking the high roads over the moors.  Everywhere has had heavy falls of snow.  A lot of field workers out, hauling dried food to the sheep and moving them to safer ground.  The light on the hills out of New Radnor was astonishing, bare smooth slopes of snow with the occasional grazing of more exposed ground where the snow hadn't fully settled.  And a soft grey muddiness to the sky, a sky swollen with snow, until hills and sky are the same colour and horizons disappear.