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In
1999 as a prompt from a writer's magazine competition, I wrote this
and sent it off to a competition. The story had to be titled 'The
Season' and conclude within a
certain amount of words. To my utter surprise Foreword Monthly
Writer's Magazine
chose it as their first prize and I won £250.
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The
editor wrote that they had had a huge response to the competition and
I was quite chuffed because these entries were all from writers and
would-be writers. The editor commented about the winning entry:
"Well written, expressive and uplifting with occasional flashes
of humour. The Season by Michael Clifford is this month's winner; a
really enjoyable read. Well done to the nine runners up...".
THE
SEASON
Gradually,
May rambled into June, and rambling was how Lana and Jerry met.
The late
snowfall had melted and the bleating of newly born lambs had faded.
Diehard bluebells sapphired the woodlands as buttercups gilded the meadows.
In the village gardens, daffodils had given way to pansies, forget me
knots, blazing baskets of fuchsia, all parading within the dreamy spray of
rosebud scent.
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Turned-on clocks created an English scenery of light nights
and vowed days without end.
Lana,
an English art teacher had read ‘A
Brief
History Of Time'. Jerry, an American physicist, had a daughter
who wanted to be a sculptor. So they found - as they made footprints
together around the common - they already had something in common.
She
liked him. She wrote that evening in her diary: ‘It is a time to reveal
and a time to withhold, a time to reach out and a time to hold back’. In
the next week, struggling with these paradoxes, she joined him on a canal
walk and a museum visit.
Then
came blistering July: blue sky, white clouds, blue lake, white swans.
Feeding white crumbs to orange beaks, Jerry and Lana told each other of
their lives. "All was devoured," Lana later wrote in her diary.
"The ripeness of our own understanding of who we are, now shared."
The Marchwind loneliness of each other’s divorce became touchable to the
other, as the long shadows of a Constable painting cocooned them in the
warm yellow evening of the solstice.
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