All last week

All last week throughout the daylight hours and sometimes beyond, the harvesters thundered round the fields, cutting and removing the grain while the weather was dry, and leaving behind neat lines of straw. Then came the balers, in some mysterious way able to gather up the straw and turn it into rectangles and rounds, the bales plopping from their behinds like eggs from a chicken.

I love bales. They're like sculptures.

On Sunday the swallows started gathering in their hundreds on the wires. All afternoon they swept over the garden, snapping up the insects, pausing only to perch and twitter excitedly on our roof.

And now they're gone.