THE ROAD

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 41, 11 May 1927, Page 14

THE ROAD

The road awoke to a clear day and a rose-pink sunrise fringing the mountains. As a road it had little importance; it was not even metalled. Rabbits fed on the grassy borders where the pavements should have been. Gorse bloomed and seeded in the hedgerows. The road had never heard of its rich city relations, where tram-lines are laid and tall buildings shut out the sky, yet even if it had it might still have chosen to run between wide fields shimmering with sunshine and pines and poplars offering their greygreen intervals of shade, for in the language of country roads it seerfied always to be saying, “I belong to no one and yet to everyone. Follow me. Follow me. Lowly though I am, I am yet a road.” Of all times the road loved best the early morning, when the dew twinkled like quicksilver on the grass and every pebble lay in a pool of shadow. Then the hedgerows were a riot of song and the whole surrounding world seemed a place of brimming promise and new beginnings. Then came Buttercup arid Pet and the placid Daisy wrenching a hasty tuft here and there on their way to the byre, the cow-boy dawdling in their wake, a soft whistle pursing his lips, his eyes on the sunrise; and later the teams, with their plodding gait and the purposeful creaking of harness; the rural postman on his rusty bicycle; the traveller, knapsack on shoulder, whittling at the dandelion puffs, his glance keened for a resting place at noon. The road had never heard of city streets, where water-sprinklers traffic their artificial dew. Sometimes the road would steal a nap, to be rudely awakened by a jolting wagon or a farmer’s trap on its way to market, but as often as not dusk came down before it was well aware that- the day had passed. Dusk and the quickening of scents that link the twilight with lier half-sister, Dawn. Dusk and the slow stars waking on a bed of velvet . . . Roads, even though the rabbits nibble where the pavements might have been, yet have their secret moods of meditation and rejoicing. —W.S.T.