Eye above stacked chevrons with quote

You will laugh, but the men from the council came on Tuesday with a van full of new posts, and I stood at the edge of Harrow Wood and told them they would not touch the old ones. Forty years those chevrons have pointed down through the trees, one behind another, so a person coming home in the dark from the mill knows which way the ground runs. Father cut the first of them. The eye at the top was his idea, a ring with a slit through it, because he said a path is only a path if somebody is watching it.

The men were polite. They said the posts were rotten at the foot and the lichen had taken the words off the last one. I went and looked. Under the green, the carving was still there, deep as a fingernail: 'My eyes are open to the path I am on'. Mother had asked him to put it there the winter she was ill, and he did it with the gouge she used for bread stamps, badly, his tongue between his teeth.

I am writing to you because I have decided to keep the old post and let them set the new ones a yard to the left. I have scrubbed the moss from the lettering with a bristle brush and a jug of rainwater, and it looks as clean as it did the day he finished it. When you come at Easter you can walk the wood with me in daylight and see whether the arrows still know where they are going. I think they do. Bring your good boots, and do not bring the city in your head.

Love, Nell