August
On the irregular stone floor of the milking parlour, a white hen stands in a burst of sun that issues through the washing trough cut in the goathouse skirting boards. Imbued with the shrewd caution reasonable to a chicken, her shadow precedes her, a staccato tract across the stone.
Together, an old friend and I laid this floor three years ago, to consolidate and make anew the arched oak railway carriage that has stood beside our track since long before my grandparents came here – deep in the hottest summer that Mid Wales has ever seen, just two years short of fifty years ago.
She has come here for food and I crouch, milking.