Yesterday, sunny and not too chilly,was a good day for a long pre-solstice walk at Falls Park in Pendleton, fortified with hot chocolate from one of my favorite coffeehouses, Falls Perk.
I bowed in great respect to the heron, who was busily fishing–with great success, I might add.
I walked into a scrum of gleaming ducks, who were clearly starving, or so they said when they saw I had food. Likely these were the same babies I had fed last spring. They were scrambling all over my feet just as they had then. Heading upstream toward the bridge, I saw another heron, who was uninterested in posing and glided off in all its magnificence.
Crossing the bridge, I walked on into the snowless but very wintery woods where a cardinal flashed me in his brilliant coat and a deer leaped across my path. I breathed deeply of the fresh brisk air. A poem I’d composed decades ago popped into my head. It had been written in February, but obviously, what was once seasonal is rapidly changing. These are the ending lines:
There is beauty in neutrality.
Brown woods and white swamp
and invisible hands in the breezes
that guide my wandering way.
Darkness fell with a thud, as it does this time of year. Time to leave.
The road through the park crosses an old metal bridge, now festooned with lights that filled my heart with joy.
Solstice.
Now the sun will turn around
or so they said in the long ago.
Before it did I went to do my outside chores,
collected water, checked to see
if the bees were bundled enough, the sparrows fed.
Chilly today but for the sun,
which is fast descending
and it is only four.
Snowdrops poked their noses up last week.
How foolish that seems
but they will bravely bloom,
and live although frozen,
and dance in the wind for weeks.
If that is not a lesson
to see us through,
what is?