Serpent eating its tail in a circle

You will laugh, but the men have finally got the stone out from under the yew. It took three days and a borrowed crowbar, and when Ambrose lifted the last slab the whole thing came up in one piece: a ring as wide as a cartwheel, carved with a serpent that has its jaws clamped on its own tail. Feathers stand up along its head like the crest on a cockerel, and the body is cut in bands, each one scored deep enough to hold rainwater. Ambrose knelt in the mud and declared it a calendar, the bands being days and the bite being the place where one year folds into the next.

I told him the bands looked more like the ribs of a rowing boat. He called me a heathen and went to fetch the wheelbarrow. We set the ring in the rose bed, where the afternoon light falls, and I have sat with it every evening since, trying to count the bands. I reach thirty-one and lose my place every time, because the crest keeps pulling my eye back to the open jaw, which seems to be deciding whether to let go.

Underneath, in a hollow the shape of a dinner plate, we found a tin box no bigger than a matchbox. Inside was a pressed swallow's feather and a scrap of paper in a careful hand: Begin again when the bite is gone. Nobody at the house can say who wrote it, and Ambrose only shrugs and says the rain has had the rest of the message.

I have decided to leave the ring where it lies, half in the roses and half in the sun, and to let the couch grass find its way through the gaps. Ambrose says it will be swallowed within a decade. I think that is rather the point. Come in June, and bring your own count, and we will see who gets furthest before she loses her place.