Day 4 (2/2) I’m taking an early evening walk around the village perimeter. A text from the husband, “running late.” I reply with a photo of my location and “From ‘Hell’s Hole’ I stab at thee! Or in your general direction!” (A bastard child of Khan and Monty Python that only we could love.) Housing complexes are arranged along the river so far below that I am dizzy with the seeing of it. It’s just 6 pm when I meet another walker on the footpath and confirm the full loop can be completed before 6:30 and my Skype with Helen Rollins. We are planning another music video when I’m in Belfast and working out the final details tonight. I forge ahead through dimming day and come out onto the road a stone’s throw from the village. Stewart is at the bench in front of the tea shop when I arrive and I explain that I’m due on a call in 7 minutes. He wonders how we are liking it here. I tell him we love the quiet and the slow pace, and the perfect little cottage right in the middle of it all. “But do you know,” he confers, “that the man and his wife across the street are moving further out? Not quiet enough!” Disbelief fills me. I laugh and shake my head. “This man wouldn’t happen to be named Clive?” I ask. At this revelation, he starts. After all these years, even the smallness of his own village is electrifying. We bid farewell and I pass another man further up the hill who intones, “6 minutes until that call!” The air sparks as I turn the skeleton key at the cottage.
West Yorkshire – Day 4 (2/2) The skeleton key at the cottage.
