Stepping stones

I went out for a stroll this morning, after the winds had eased and the sun was peeping out between the vanishing clouds. But given the amount of rain that we'd so recently enjoyed, I was armed (or footed, I suppose) with my hiking boots (by Merrell, with Gore-Tex) so that I would be able to wander hither and thither, on and off road as the mood struck me.

So it was that towards the end of my stroll I decided to wander down the unpaved (unlaid) track of the bridleway and into the field, just because I could.

Or so I thought. As I made my way down the bridepath, the extent of the flooding meant that the drainage channel on one side of the path had filled, overflowed, and had run deeply over the path at one particular point.

I stood there a moment, faintly disappointed, but only faintly. After all, this was but a whim, and easily put aside.

But then there stirred in me a desire to push on, to explore, to see the other side of the puddle. So I cast about for a solution.

And a solution presented itself.

To one side of the path, a tree was leaning across the path, and had been cut by some passing woodcutter or sawsman, then sectioned into neat logs, perhaps 20 or 25 cm in diameter with cleancut flat edges. As I looked between them and the puddle, the kernel of an idea began to make itself known to me.

And so it was that a few moments later I skipped across my own stepping stones, splashing safely down on the other side of Lake Puddle, and striding cheerfully into the field that was at the end of my quest.

Sometimes - just sometimes, but actually more often than we let ourselves believe - some things are just meant to happen.