Geometric faceted portrait on a thigh

The theodolite finally sits level on the stump above Harrow Wood, and I have been up here since six, counting the same three beeches over and over because the numbers keep wanting to become something else. You will laugh. Mr Pell says it is the damp in my eyes. But every ridge I sight comes back to me as a plane of shadow, one side dark and the other lit like the flat of a knife, and by noon I had drawn the whole valley in triangles, so that the wood looked cut from slate.

Mrs Corran at the forest's edge saw my sheets pinned to her gate and asked for one. She would not say why. She only tapped the largest triangle, the one that forms the hill's brow, and said her mother had walked this ground with a lamp and a chain, and always came home with the same shape in her head. I did not tell her that a survey is only a set of lies agreed upon by measurement.

Yesterday the mist lifted off the valley all at once. The bracken along the wood's margin curled like hair, and the shadows the rock made set themselves into the planes of a face, brow and cheek and a mouth turned a little away, as if it had heard its name called from the village and did not care to answer. I stood at the trees with my plumb bob swinging and waited for the lines to dissolve. They did not.

I will bring the drawing home on Saturday. Keep the kettle on. Tell Mr Pell the chain is short by two links and I will not be sorry.

Your loving husband, Tom