It’s the last day of August. One of those thick fog mornings. It feels like the lull at high tide, just before the ocean pulls back on itself. A stretched breath. A slow turn at the arc of the seasons. Usually by this time of the year I am ready for fall. For the air to turn crisp. For the architecture of the forest to reveal itself once again. For the tobacco-sweet smell of the earth on our wooded paths. But on this morning, at least, I am not ready.
Thirty years have passed and a person I’d forgotten steps into the room, her eyes wrinkled and hair silver, but her voice, her essence, the same. How is it that someone forgotten, remembered with only the barest of details, stale labels and objective identifiers, can, in the space of a moment, become so fully remembered, recognized, rejoiced? She walked into the room and was real to me again.
The sky is swept clean of clouds, and likewise swept of warmth, the breezes that chase through the treetops scurrying the warmth away from the ample light. I have spent the last five days or so without focus or fire, an ebb of purpose, and I say to myself now, in all seriousness, that I should find a better way to make use of those small seasons when I lose my sense of direction. Which is of course an impossibility, a contradiction, a cruel joke of my own thought patterns.
The sky is a fat slow river of cloud this morning, and I am in the eddy, sheltered from shadow and rain by the high broad shoulders of the Black Mountains. It’s a lovely little phenomenon, that the whole region might be draped in cloud save this one little spot where I live, drenched in light.
There was rain in the morning, waves of it, but the clouds lifted away a little bit, leaving the forest dressed in a wet gray. Now everything drips–especially the long leaves of the rhododendron, glossy and jeweled with droplets, and the hollies, which stand tall and graceful in this part of the forest. Never a truly tall tree, like the pines or oaks, still the architecture of hollies inspires–the limbs lifted in a graceful shrug, curved, then dressed with the loveliest of green-spiked leaves that drop their water jewels with a delicate chorus.