What is aesthetically beautiful country?

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/aesthetic/

The WordPress daily post is always a challenge but I don’t often find time to write on the chosen theme. Today, however, we’re on the same page. I’ve been considering writing about where I live now.

I have long-held opinions about what I consider aesthetically beautiful scenery. It involves water, mountains and blue skies.

Well, here in Norfolk there are no mountains. But there’s plenty of water and sometimes there are also blue skies.

I started out feeling cold on this Sunday afternoon walk around the Broad but soon had to peel off the top layer. Some Norfolk Broads came about as a result of peat diggings in medieval times but others, like this one in my photograph were chalk excavations. Rising sea levels completed the job. You’d never know it, but the fine city of Norwich is just behind those trees.

The Norfolk Broads are a popular English tourist attraction. Thousands of people come in summer to spend their vacation time on the water, stopping off at waterside hostelries before moving off in time to moor at another hostelry for the evening. Boat hire is big business here. Some folk live by the water and have their own. It’s a good place to house-sit!

Winter brings a different kind of aesthetic beauty and makes creatives like me get out the paint brushes and/or write poetry, especially when mist hangs over the water and everything is still.

Winter Staithe ©

( a staithe is a cutting or inlet )

 

No wind to fill the billowing sail.

No sun to bathe the picnic decks

where plimsolled little sailors skipped

gaily in and out and dripped

their melting ice creams down their necks.

No birds to follow in the trail

to search for scraps, to wheel and cry

and loudly squabble ownership

of tasty morsels newly slipped

into the wake. The staithe and sky

in rippled stillness form a pale

and misty shadow of the days

gone by. The old gate creaks

its winter joints. The reeds break

through the grey and filmy haze

with shots of gold: thin echo of a summer’s tale.

. . . . . . . . . .

More Norfolk posts to come in the goodness of time. Leave a comment, please. Don’t be shy. I love to hear from you.