I'm sitting outside on fragrant layered forest ground , having made my usual way here by twists, turns ; the same system of landmarks and wayfaring you used as a child, if you were lucky enough to be grown up near a forest. To become friends . To greet you at the end of the difficult or delicious day.
We always turn left at the Maple, down by the edge of the yard -up and over the fallen rotting trunk. Beneath the painful and capturing wild Rose fronds , twist round past the brambles curved around another tree; hang a right at the small Juniper . The oldest Maple now in sight, recently shorn of it's embedded rusted barb wire, as we head down the hill. Then up and over fieldstones , into the deer thicket of Paperbirch saplings. Turn right heading down the steepening land, as the expanse of river Outwaters , far below the ridge , becomes visible.
I sit down on some luscious spot, surrounded by masses of emerging tender Fern , as moss spreads up the north side of the forest's trees, from the spate of recent rains.
The magnificent light show begins, as we settle ourselves; Dante still for a moment from his careening about the forest.
Pale pungent blues and fluttering pink stripes careen across the skies overhead, seen through the staccato of delicate treetops. The sun, gilded, slowly sheds it's incandescence- disappearing quietly behind a far off range of mountains.
In the meantime, there's some insect, inhaled as I walked the hills, now stuck, dead,in my throat.
The sunset is fading behind still bare trees, that hold a barely discernible sprinkle of green tipped leaf beginnings. Before us spreads a carpet of Solomon's Seal and Trillium beneath and between all of the forest.
We stand to turn and tromp back up the foothill, Dante again racing in laps about me, a streak of young, glistening black , across the loam and leaf covered hills- as I look up to watch steep dark lands of storm clouds passing by overhead.
Reaching the house, darkness falls. as our two neighborhood bats swoop and feed . I sit outside, alone, infused with the stillness and songs of evening creatures moving into the night. One elegant bat swings by , 3 feet from my face , to say hello; and there I am, left, utterly entranced.
Moths begin fluttering about under cover of dusk, rushing to do their business, while avoiding capture from the Phoebes , and later, the bats; then taking refuge beneath the creases of the aged Maple's bark.
I sit, as insects appear with their impeccable seasonal timing . I am soaking in the essence of the foothill I live upon, the history of glacier and basalt and steep decline down to the times that dug out this aged river. So soon the trees again will explode with tender new leaves, and the view on three sides of blue hills will be invisible once again, until fall comes round, the cold progresses, and the trees fall deeply asleep. Here, is the present, pregnant with past and future rhythms and cycles that begin to make sense, far within, as we slowly age. And find ourselves, sitting out, gazing out across the vast distant expanse of everywhere at home.
The stream ,on the far edge of the conservation field ,following its aged ravine, sings loudly with the surfeit from recent storms, as rain , large ungainly springtime drops, again begins to fall upon the land.
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