ONE SONG ONE PICTURE. The River / Bruce Springsteen

IT’S JULY 2013 and there’s a heatwave. We’re staying in the Peak District, in the house where George Eliot wrote Adam Bede. It is square and white with giant doorways and wide floorboards. The fields on all four sides are occasionally occupied by a herd of sheep. They spend the long hot days with their mouths to the grass. Sometimes they chomp so loud you hear it all the way from the belly of the house. Every so often the herd drifts leftways towards the farm buildings and a stillness falls over the fields until their return.

It’s July 2013, and it’s the summer I discover Bruce Springsteen. I’ve encountered him before, in brief stutters: in a parked car outside the church (we’re late but Mum won’t let us get out until the radio finishes Born To Run), on a family road-trip to Stratford (my ipod battery fails, I borrow Mum’s, I listen to Thunder Road once, I listen to nothing else for the rest of the ride), and in Hyde Park, and Wembley Stadium, and the Olympic Park, where I stand wide-eyed among a crowd that smells of hay and beer and happiness.

One evening that week in July, I jump a fence into the fields. There are flies and birds, but the air is that particular shade of stillness that falls after a hot day. At the far edge of the field after a bank of rushes comes a river, purplish and wavering, populated by dragonflies and a heron. I have my headphones in. As I approach the water Springsteen’s The River starts to play, like magic.

I unplug the headphones and let the opening notes of the harmonica skim and skid along the river, and up through the trees and peaks beyond.

Originally published at http://katef-m.blogspot.com.