Country diary: Listen closely, as the breeze scrolls through June's playlist | Paul Evans

The Marches, Shropshire: Two wasps hover around a burrow; the chime of a cuckoo brings a rare clarity; a downed beech tree tells tales of a lost garden"Listen!" said nobody, probably the breeze, but it felt like the right thing to do. There's a pile of branches cut from fallen horse chestnut boughs next to a storm?blown beech tree, a still life from carnage that makes a good place to sit. "Sometimes I sits and thinks, sometimes I just sits," (an old Shropshire saying), and the breeze strengthens with thoughts it has gathered and shunts through the sky.From somewhere south, clouds lumber over the horizon at a snail's pace, in a daydream of rippling air, eating these country miles. The chime of a cuckoo, or the memory of one, haunts the breeze. It brings a rare clarity, as if elsewheres that are usually smudgy and far have been drawn into the same nostalgic field. Blown in by deja vu, distant hills of the Wrekin, Caer Caradoc, Long Mynd and Stiperstones loiter on the margin. Close by, a blackbird sings into the clear airflow, and another improvises a reply from further trees. Continue reading...