Pine trees, mountains and vertical script sketch

The cart came up from Ashby on Tuesday with the salt and your boots, which were not yours at all but the cobbler's, because the ones you left by the door had split along the welt. I have put them by the stove so they dry out before anyone thinks to sell them. Mother says you will be angry about that. Let her say it.

The pines at the top of Corran Wood are down to four now. The wind took the big one in March, the one we used to climb as children, and it lay across the path for a week until Anselm and the Pryce boys cut it into rounds. You could see the peak clean from the stile after that, the grey shoulder of Harrow Tor with its snow still in the gullies, and I stood there some mornings longer than I meant to, thinking you would be on the far side of it by now.

Here is the thing I meant to write. The surveyor's man came back through and asked after the old drover's track, and I told him what you told me once, that the track goes over the ridge only in the right weather and you have to know the wind to find it. He laughed and said that was not a method. I said it was the only method anyone here has ever had. He wrote it down anyway in his small book.

Come home before the thaw, or send word. I will leave the lamp lit at the stile. Your sister, Ruth.