Footprints

Everything seems solid now, but the evidence is still here below the rumpled surface: an unknown creature appeared at dusk, made a transit across a small nearly-frozen pond, and did not bother to look back. There’s a sense of absence with these footprints, as if they are the declaration of a missed meeting, signed in ice.

Icicle

They grow like reverse weeds, tiny and fragile and only a little bit cold. They’ll feed on snow, transformed by cold nights and sunny days to icy vigour, growing like ragweed, burdock, yarrow, sprouting on every crevice and ledge and branch until the world is over-run by translucent hanging wildflowers.

Microcosm

A forest on a mountaintop, sheer cliffs of dizzying heights set in a sea of brown and curling waves. We can hardly see the stars anymore to know how small we are, so we must imagine ourselves even smaller.

Old Shoe

Another artefact, cracked and moss-covered, lies damply beside the brook. There is a iron-mine of rusting garbage in this spot, along with still-recognizable household items much too young to be antiques. I don’t know why our parents and grandparents favoured river banks for dumping. Eventually, they might have thought, it would all just wash away.

Before the Fall

They aren’t wild apples; once, this was a field or an orchard, and a human hand planted this tree. Now, alders and hawthorn grow up around it in thickets so I am surprised, when I stumble through here, to see the perfection of this fruit. The tree just keeps on doing its tree job, feeding us, humans or deer or yellowjackets, without prejudice.

Out of Season

There’s something about finding a single wild strawberry in autumn, ripe for eating. It’s a late bloomer, a tortoise, a valiant effort, a Rocky, an old college try, a small miracle. My mouth waters, tasting red, sweet, sunshine. I carry it protectively in my hand for almost an hour, my palm damp in the out-of-season heat. When I give it away, I can taste gift.

Revealed

The path is so overgrown that I have to cut my way through with long-handled pruning shears. When I look up, an abandoned nest is right above my head; I could reach out and touch it, lift it from the tree, carry it home. But I back away carefully, as it it were a living thing that might be startled by sudden movement. I don’t think it is a trick of the light; I am sure I see it breathing.

Beavers or Trees

Overnight, a small pond has been transformed into a large one. Trees stand knee-deep in water, unable to wade to higher ground. This slow drowning will be only one of the costs the beavers will exact from this landscape, though they have made a home of startling beauty. Briefly, I contemplate pulling the sticks and branches and boughs from the culvert, but quickly I recognize I can’t do the math: How many trees is a beaver worth? And how many beavers, one tree?

Feather

A hawk’s feather lies along the path. I stop to examine it, look carefully around to see if there are any others hidden among the bushes, try to discover whether just this feather was lost during a moult, or whether clumps of scattered feathers might indicate that a hawk died here. Today, as usual, there isn’t enough evidence to draw a firm conclusion. It is the forest’s equivalent of a single well-worn running shoe found beside a highway: we have to make up the back-story ourselves.

Snow House

Though we walked by this spot a hundred times in the summer, I never noticed the nest. I never heard the music of the family that was raised here, nor saw the fledglings among the blooming lupines. Now that the leaves are off the trees, it seems the winter is hatching endless snow.