some writing

I wrote this for an NCEA assignment. A few too many adjectives, but I like it.

Early morning, and the pale wintry sun is still hiding behind thick, shifting, polyphonic layers of clouds. From the sky hangs a heavy mist, dampening the air into the blurred obscurity of Debussy's Voiles. Last night's frost coats the grass and trees; covers pavement and driveway with that treacherous black ice which renders walkways unusable; lies thick on car windows, dense, white, impenetrable. Jack Frost has paid his respects to the house as well, delicately patterning the doors and windows with silvery swirls and spirals. The house itself is silent, no noisy chattering and bickering echoing throughout its walls. No child has left the warm safety of his bed, tucked in tightly against the biting cold. Through broken venetian blinds they can just glimpse this new world, this world of pre-dawn, of silence.

A thin finger of sunlight splinters the closely-packed bundle of clouds, reaching out cautiously to finger trees and hedges before retreating behind nimbus and stratus. More sun slowly creeps through; the rain-soaked air lightens. A chinkl of light clints off the corrugated iron of the garage roof. The mist begins to dissipate.

The gathering breeze rustles the tops of the pear and plum trees; stirs the rusted wind chimes, clinking them together. It whistles through the branches of the fallen apple tree, a mountain of once-proud foliage now lying dead on the grass.

The last shades of pink and orange are fading away, clouds parting to reveal a brittle sun that gives off an icy warmth. On the windows and car, icce slowly starts to melt, water trickling down to form shiny rivulets on the concrete below. A few birds prattle cheerfully to each other, then fall silent. All is still.

Then - creak, scrape, clunk - the back door bangs open, and four children, half-clad with coats on, pour out of the house, dash down the steps, laughing together. One wears only pajamas and a dressing gown, "I'm not cold," she boasts, shivering slightly. Only the eldest is missing - she's inside, playing her flute.

They converge in Dandelion Grove, where, come spring, dandelions spring up into a thick, sunny, indestructible carpet. Down beneath the bathroom window is the old vegetable garden, covered in a mat of weeds and grass from when Dad tried to mow it, impossible to pull up. Last year's rotten apples have been trodden underfoot into a soupy brown mush, mixed in with carrot tops, eggshells and potato peels that have missed the compost heap.

They take "potshots" with stale bird's bread at the broken mesh of the toilet room window. Most miss the mark. They hear their sister trip over scalic passages of her Bach sonata, smile at each other, call out to her. "Hey! Come outside, we're going up the paddock! Justine!" But she does not answer.

Clambering over the fence, they pause to help the youngest, who nearly falls into a rusty bucket of rainwater. An up the slope, muddying their clothes in haste, dodging the sharp thistle-trees with their many sharp thorns, poised to catch on unwary clothing. Past the "mole-hole", where they like to huddle on a summer's afternoon, watching the fluffy, candyflossed sky. Here, their world is simplified to this hill, with it's tall, waving, hayfever-inducing grasses. Now that the neighbour's goat is gone, they grow with reckless abandon.

At the top, finally, standing together on a knobbly tree stump, gazing down at their house with its plain, white roof. They can see the pears and apples they have thrown up over the years, rolled down into the gutter and blocking the drain. The chimney on the side of the house, dusted with "fairy kisses" of cobwebs and dust. The porch window, broken recently with a carelessly-flung rock. This side of the house is almost an eyesore, but the children know it for what it is - their home, their haven. Their safe place.

The final, faint cadences of the Back trickle out of the window, bringing the piece to a close.