We took the path out of the village and up the wooded hill, and we saw that the landscape was already wearing its early winter coat.

It was not cold, just that early evening coolness that makes one think of wood fire, and cosiness in a warm house.

You looked at the sky, in the direction of the soon setting sun, the pale blue of the horizon now tainted a deep orange.

Then we heard them: an impeccable flight of migrating cranes, the thin V shape of their formation cutting through the evening, dead on the orange globe.

You pressed my hand and said: “You see, they are flying all the way from the Baltic, over this landscape, every year, stopping somewhere in the Ardennes for the night, on their way to Southern Spain, or maybe even Africa, and, you know, our descendants will still see them, after we have long gone.”