The woodpeckers song.
The first thing I saw in the living room was the squat lamp, with its light glowing warmly from a fat shade, sitting on the dark stained, low, chunky wooden table in the corner.
I sat down in the comfy two seater sofa and picked up the country living magazine from the coffee table next to the sofa. The front of the magazine had an attractive golden orange and brown wreath on a cottage door as an illustration but as I leafed through the pages it was the article on the Pendle Witches that took my attention. I settled back to read it. It was interesting to see Alice Nutter portrayed from a journalist point of view. She of course was the main, most famous witch from the Lancaster Witch trials.
It was about three thirty in the afternoon and the light was dimming outside. It was the perfect time of day for a coffee and a relax with a magazine, being the interval between the daily chores and the preparation of the evening meal. 'My guilty pleasure' time, as I called it. The house was warm and cosy.
I looked up from the article in the magazine and my eyes were taken with the clock on the wall. It had been bought n a trip to scar top at Haworth and the first time my husband and I had fallen for a piece of wall art at the same time. The setting sun was sending it's last fingers of light to the burnished metal and the colours it revealed echoed the autumn colours outside. Warm reds and oranges, golds and glints of green, all added to the ambience and relaxed me further.
The woodpecker was tapping in the woods. I could hear him quite well even when indoors, with all doors and windows shut. When we first moved in I used to think it was a visitor at the door and regularly went to answer it. What a fool I had been, a regular towny. Now he is my friend and neighbour and I listen out for his visits and look for the flashes of colour.
Through the French windows I spied the woodpecker on the peanuts that were hanging from a bracket on the fence. The bracket was in the shape of a witch. My husband had crafted it for my birthday and joked that he had made it in my likeness.
I slowly got up out of the chair even more slowly, made my way to the window to look more closely at him. Usually he would catch me approaching and fly off, but he just stayed there. I moved closer, he moved off the nuts and sat on the witches broom. I moved closer still, until I was right up against the window. I could have sworn he winked at me. I winked back.
My border collie chose this moment to enter the room. He came to the window and looked out in the direction of the hanging peanuts. He gave a low growl and tilted his head to one side, then he backed off slightly and growled again this time from curiosity. The woodpecker replied by spreading its wings out, but not to fly, it looked like an embrace.
It was all very strange. I had a deep feeling that it meant something, that this was not a normal day. What I had witnessed in these last few minutes was not an isolated incident but the beginning of a series of events that I would later think had been a dream.
But do not worry dear reader - I will not end this story with; ' and then I woke up' - but instead I will tell you the whole unbelievable tale.
