The English Countryside at Easter

We spent Easter weekend with my husband's family in the country, about an hour southeast of London. After five years of frequent visits, the green, human-sized English landscape is now familiar and I have to think back to my first visit to remember what made it so striking and so foreign. On that visit, my then-boyfriend-now-husband picked me up at the airport, and we drove through the outskirts of London into the narrow winding roads of my mother-in-law's corner of Kent. Like streams, the roads have unpredictable twists, and hundreds of years of traffic on these ancient lanes have worn grooves into the landscape. Along the side, the branches are often trimmed into a neat line so that they won't trespass onto the lane, and then the trees open up into a canopy above. Two cars can't pass, so neighbors must back up into driveways or little shoulders to give way to oncoming traffic. The clumps of woods open onto beautiful rolling countryside, with farsighted views over fields of sheep. All the while, these narrow country roads pass house after house because in southeast England even the countryside is crowded. There are no billboards and many of the houses date back hundreds of years, and so, if you ignore the cars and the paved roads, one can imagine a trip to the country as an almost-successful trip back in time. My mother-in-law lives on a hillside, and the view from her back garden slopes away until reaching the flat Weald which spreads out below for miles. The fields are not like the square patchwork quilt of American farmland, but instead they are irregular shapes, with few straight lines and no right angles, and they are smaller than their American equivalents. England is green in a way that the States are not. Even in the middle of winter, when a Michigan forest is a dead grey-brown, southeast England maintains a bit of its color; the leaves may be gone, but there are lichen and patches of grass. This may seem a slight difference, but it is visible even from a plane. This Easter was cold and damp, and Easter morning the view was obscured by fog, but even then we were greeted by the English countryside as we stepped out into the trills and warbles and songs of dozens of birds.