Change

"Dad has taken the girls to go sledding," my sister writes, and I smile. I think about our hill. To get there when it snowed we walked a carriage-road concealed by middle-aged, mostly white oaks; at the end on the left side was an old trash heap where we dug in summer with a stick for antique bottles. In layers of denim and cotton--no fancy winter clothes, just sweatpants over jeans--we spread out across that whole hill and sledded smoothly down.

Today, a "new" house (built twenty-five years ago), its winding driveway lined with evergreens, makes that impossible. And a neighbor's attempted orchard atop the hill seems to weigh it down. Is it typical to say, when I visit my parents and take a walk, that the hill no longer looks that tall?

It may be only that I have grown, my memory reshaping the land. But surely the land must shift, like one's own leanings, throughout a human life: soil loosened, slope reduced, or surface concealed by new roots.

Gravity

I walk on the surface of mostly month old snow, the trail packed so well by deer and other snowshoe-ers that I don't need to wear my own. The low angle of the January noon sun has created a taller forest on the ground than the one I walk through. I move along, eclipsing shrubs, trying to determine the hue of the shadows before me--charcoal or ash, the color of evening or morning.

When I get to the open field, absent of trees, I could be walking on some other planet's icy moon. Snow has drifted over the path, and with every other step my foot falls through.

I think of a friend in Kansas, awaiting a snowstorm, who has written me about her six-month-old: "Edison is in his Johnny Jumper and I propped up a box full of his toys next to him so he could dig them out and drop them on the floor."

"Glad to see he has discovered gravity," I will write back soon. Sometimes the world seems all push and pull: trees and toddlers growing up, me balanced on this temporary surface, but returning to the ground with every footfall. We learn to throw, jump, walk, but lest we forget where we belong, the sun presses us back to the earth in shadow.

Blizzard

Wind lacks clarity. It turns the snowy yard into a sort of desert: un-skiable, pine-needle-covered grass shows at one end, but raspberry bushes and currants lie buried at the other. There’s no way to tell what has happened, how many inches have fallen, the evidence all up in the air continuously turning.

It is so cold I cannot gather snow. Can’t shape it into a small world, packed between my gloves, then destroy it like an angry god; can’t roll it into three large worlds, stack them, and call it a man.

I wonder what my dog thinks. She brings winter in on long toe-hairs, accretions of ice and dirt from the road, like the nuclei of tiny comets that drop off and melt on the hardwood. Does she think this is the way things will be now—this constant rattle at the windows, the cold—or recognize it for what it is: a temporary lean away from the sun?

Still Mixed Up

Falling rain instead of falling leaves, a trail that smells of skunk. I follow the wet-mop coat of my dog down the warm path, past the Tickseed sunflowers. If I didn’t know better—these blooms come in late summer or fall—I’d think it was spring: water, odor, and primary yellow.

But back at the trailhead, something I earlier missed, a sure sign of autumn: four bent legs of a deer hacked off and neatly piled, as if running so quickly they’d left their body behind; a few feet over, a square of hide; and further still the carcass, snout raised mid-howl (as if it could), ribs exposed, innards gone mortician-style.

Mixed Up

The astringent air, fragrant as a washrag dipped in rubbing alcohol and lime—no doubt from the Witch Hazel blooms that abound in the understory of this autumn forest—carries a sound shrill and repetitious as a blacksmithing hammer, but more organic. It comes from far off, and from something small—a frog smaller than a pea-coat button: Hyla crucifer—the Spring Peeper.

Why does he call in fall? Amplexus—his pseudo-coital hug—accomplished long ago, his months of foraging nearly over, he should be hopping from his human-knee-high perch on a tree or shrub to slip noiselessly under a forest-floor leaf or log, where he’ll spend the winter sometimes frozen, sometimes thawing. Instead he chirps, over and over.

It’s likely the photo-period that has him going. October 10th could be April 9th as far as he knows, sunrise and sunset the same. He has no memory of mating, no knowledge of orbits and equinoxes, no calendar to keep him straight, only the sun on his throat, which seems to draw his call out and into its own fiery heart.

I listen to him sing, alone with the sun, doing what he thinks is right, no one to judge.

The Book is Out!

Interested in more lyrical accounts of encounters with nature? My book, Deranged: Finding a Sense of Place in the Landscape and in the Lifespan has just been published by Apprentice House of Loyola University Maryland. You can order it from your local bookstore or on Amazon.com.

Alert

Driving over, a new friend sees a bear.

I am all eyes on my walk later.

Two garter snakes out for one last bask on the sunny trail rustle through dry grass—long, dull, and flattened—as if leaving behind their stripes for the winter. Next, I spot a fallen bird’s nest, small, constructed of birch bark and lichens. In the distance, something the color of sandy soil flung from a recently dug hole takes the shape of a deer. Prom-gown purple, aster is everywhere. But what I love most: a witch hazel bloom, like the hair of a cartoon character, sparse and frazzled.