Snow on an October Afternoon

The long straight track, the utter stillness of the air -no breeze, no movement- and silence. No birdsong even. Nothing. Just this track through the Sussex Downs. Above, the sky, blue and cold, and the sea in the distance still as a photograph.
The white track we walked upon. Chalk-dusty and straight. Talking about ley-lines and black dogs. 'Wish hounds'  they're known as in Sussex Folklore. Get the map out. Crouch down in the autumn. See if we're walking a leyline - whatever they are - no-one actually knows even if they exist.
A celtic equation. Use a long piece of grass as a ruler, measure a line from tumulus to barrow, through old church and hilltop. Can't remember how many points there are supposed to be to make a ley. Anyway. Three points in around half a mile.
The long straight track.
A ley line for Sunday.

It was like walking through an equation, as if a perfect piece of mathematics had expressed itself as a landscape. Rolling hills, the distant sea, the ceaseless tone of the sky. Everything so still.
Bits of memory ragged and caught on the air. Sheep-wool round barbed wire. Look to my right to a nestling of houses, across barbed and thorny field. Tangle-wild trees, stunted in the hill-top air. This looked familiar. That curious kind of deja-vu that gives you half-memories of times you've never known - or half-memories of dreams you have.

Deeper into the country and the track, now running along a ridge began to curve. Everything began to seem quite surreal, almost dream-like. The quality of the light. October clarity. 'That valley looks old' Em observed. She was right. I had been thinking much the same. The valley to our left did look old. The clump of trees now in shadow. Even the new building, still held up by scaffolding, looked old.
On the slope of the hill across the other side of the valley, sheep grazed in the last few hours of sunlight, gold like apples fallen in this silver season.
Where were the wasps, I wondered, don't they hover round fallen apples on October days.
No-one here.
This ley line for sunday.
Still.

By the time we reached Rottingdean, the spell had passed, and we were back in Sunday again. The bus ride along the coast was pleasant and exhausted. When we got off the bus, opposite Churchill Square shopping centre, there was, inexplicably, a pile of snow by the newsagent.
I prodded it with my foot.
It was definetly a pile of snow.
On a pavement on a bright October day.
I don't want to think about it too hard and find a rational explanation which there undoubtedly is.
I wonder if its melted yet.