Yesterday I took a walk through the woods behind our house, down the path that leads to the meadow. I'm not really sure why it's called a meadow; what's there is under water. Apparently this was a grassy meadow before the beavers chose to block Willow Brook and create a large, oblong pond.
There are moments that must be magical, when one becomes firmly planted in the Now. Everything else seems to drop away as the mind focuses on the one thing. That's what happened yesterday. It was a beautiful late April afternoon. Daffodils and forsythia were in bloom, the grass was greening, yet a cool breeze blew from the north, as if to say that Winter has not completely released its grip. The sky was deep blue, and a caravan of small white clouds drifted from the north, passing in stately procession.
In the woods the trees were still gray, held in winter's torpor, but on the forest floor Canada mayflower was poking through the thick carpet of dead leaves. As I approached the meadow the pines and hemlocks whispered in the wind. I could see the pond through the trees, and saw the water sparkling and rippling.
At one end of the pond stand three or four dead trees, stripped of their bark, remnants of the meadow that once was here. In one of those trees a heron nest - a rough aggregation of sticks and twigs - has sat in the crook of a branch for as long as I can remember. I stepped toward the pond as quietly as I could and got to the shore just in time to see a heron perch on the side of the nest. It stood there motionless for a minute or two; if it saw me it gave no indication. Then in an instant the bird stepped down into the nest and settled itself into the nest so all I could see was its head. I stood to watch it a little longer, not wanting to scare it off the nest again. I wondered what the bird thought of the sounds of traffic that made themselves heard - faintly - over the sounds of wind and water. At the far northern end of the pond stood The Mountain, ancient pile of Kinsman granite, the landmark that means "home" to all of us who live in this area.
I turned from the pond in this magical moment of clean breeze, blue water and golden sun and headed back up the path to our house. A garter snake slithered across the path then stopped. I looked at it; it looked at me. A little later I encountered a red squirrel and it performed the same brief staring match with me. Coming over the rise and into the hollow that stands at the bottom of our hill I found wood frog eggs in a vernal pool - cloudy masses of jelly adhering to submerged branches, each mass holding the promise of hundreds of amphibian lives.
The path turns steep as it approaches our house. By the time I reached the top of the hill the sinus infection that has left me tired and in a funk all week finally caught up with me, and I sat on a flat rock to rest beside my wife's bed of daffodils and hyacinths. As I sat I looked out to the hills that stand to our south. Each rounded peak stood purple in the late afternoon shadows. The hills, the path, the woods, the meadow, and the flat rock upon which I sat and everything else that was illuminated by the golden sun were all bathed in the cool, blessed wind from the northwest. My head was sore and my arms and legs ached, the magic persisted unperturbed, without end.
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