This morning, after days of rain, a waterlogged landscape is resting gently under a placid sky. Clouds have arranged themselves in neat strips, allowing clear bands of blue to permeate through. It’s not over, but for a moment, there’s pause.

I am settling in the seat of my stopping service across the Chilterns. A gentle roll call of stations, the hum of the engine, the doors’ gentle exhalation to meet each platform. Barely a soul. January. Sunday. All of that.

In an hour or so my froggy faced son will be wriggling in my arms, his playful yet insistent sound making demanding this or that (or just delighting in something, or just sounding, because he can), and I’ll cling to a jumble of consonants and wonder once again how deliberate their forming was.

And as my mind drifts from him back to these rain furrowed fields, I reflect that I too have been waterlogged these months, expanding, saturated, to contain the endless downpour of his unfettered living and the swell of love I gather it in. The swell of love, anger, loss, fear and joy. All of that.

And then the sun breaks through and the ditches shimmer silver, everything reflected in them all at once, and the doors inhale a family of four, a tumble of toddlers and a day’s plans of museums and tube lines and where we will eat.

I check my watch. The clouds rearrange themselves and load the horizon. Laden lakes wink and twinkle. Ponds conceal their depths with a lid of brightest light where weekend walkers wave as we pass, their dogs nuzzling into burrows, tails wagging with discovery.

The world stretches, breathes, takes it all in, stride by muddy stride.