On a Changing Place, a Passage -- by Alex Ranieri

By instinct, now, I found my way to the orchard. There was a little alcove in a hornbeam hedge concealing a stone bench, ideally suited to drink up the evening in a patch of comfortable shade. One felt oneself at an old proscenium theatre, its walls painted with garish scenes of natural beauty; and yet, how far from garish, the living, breathing copy! Here is too much which slips through the sieve of perception, and leaves us with an awareness of hourly loss. The painting on an opera house wall might be minutely combed over one evening, and be known ever after—but every second in a garden brings some invisible birth or death, the which will gradually change the place we loved one evening, by the next, irrevocably, and for ever.