A bumpy track led to the old cottage. The place hadn't been lived in for quite a while but was intact, a perfect timber-framed Tudor cottage. Even the old thatch didn't leak. Just two rooms downstairs with a small lean-to on the back, the kitchen still had a Dutch oven and an old copper for hot water. A kite-winder staircase followed the central chimney up to two bedrooms.

The place was coming up for auction. Desperately I wanted it. At the auction it made four times what I could afford. The buyer did not move in however. There was a story about him being in prison. At this time the farmers used to dispose of waste straw after combining by burning it in the fields, a practice now banned. That's how the thatch caught alight. There was no attempt to fight the fire because no-one even noticed it. Gales later blew in the gable ends, then the chimney crumbled, brambles grew over it until there was hardly a visible trace of the place left.

I wish I could have saved it. It would have been beautiful. Instead I bought a little terrace, then a detached needing renovation, then the one we have today. I got what I wanted eventually, but I still think about that old place sometimes, and how I wanted it.

I dreamed
I was
At Birthwaite
I awoke
I was

Keith Wilson, Windermere, UK, Oct 2016

.
In dusk a cloud moves,
Barely are there any stars
And the sheet drops, sinks,
As lovers we came to this
Gentle pond without guile
Under the willows green,
Set on the banks of whin,
In sight of a stone bridge
And settled in to watch
The swans arrive and go,
Like windy arcs of bounty
Under great falling blanket
Of indigo and gold sparkling,
Enameling eyes of the heavens.

Now, I come to visit alone,
Only memories gliding slow,
Love has fled near after song
The sweetest spring awakening,
How time unveils dark truths,
My hair, it falls in the wind
With the groping willows,
The godly eyes of the skies
Are now mere stars that flash,
My love is betrothed to another,
Still, the cool white swans at dusk
Ride in waters turned shallow, murky
And black as their eyes in day fall,
And yet they remain wondrous,
White rose of my soul,
Drifting away.