Flying

We begin to descend over Lake Michigan. The pilot has offered free TV. My seatmate watches Real Housewives of New Jersey but in the small screen flush with the seatback in front of me I have been tuned to the channel that shows our elevation and approximate location. We are now at 9,000 feet. I press my forehead against the window and look down at the wing, the lake.

I am immediately taken in. The plane begins to turn so that my gaze is nearly perpendicular to the water. A little sick, I keep looking. The lake has become impressionistic, like we are flying not over water but over the enlarged petal of a Lupine or Vinca. The tip of the wing looks deceptively close to the water. We continue to turn and the water slips into focus. I can see ripples, but the plane's direction and the opposing flow of the current have canceled out any sign of movement. Now it appears as if we are circling down onto the back of some exotic reptile, a skink perhaps, not just blue-tongued but blue-skinned, its cracked scales the color of water through a descending plane's window.

The scene blurs again. I must become an insect in a soda can hurled across a field, my brain a few simple nerves, in order to process what I see when I travel by plane: a reality show I just can't believe. Suddenly I would not care if we continued to circle down into that periwinkle haze. Like a bee approaching a flower, I am tuned to a single color and nothing else--no fear, no hope. Just aim.

Favorite Trail in Fair Weather

A man in snowshoes and fluorescent yellow vest asks me to "Hold up a minute." I pause on the trail. My dog, Betsy, stretches the leash to its end and sits; we are a planet and her moon halted in our hurtle through space. A barky German Sheppard also fluorescing-- in orange, with the words "Search Dog" on its jacket--crosses our path. He leaps toward a woman crouching in the woods, turns back, and barks once to the yellow-clad man, who then releases me, saying, "You're alright," as if I needed him to bid me entrance.

A few steps farther on, I unleash Betsy and she begins her familiar trajectory, revolving around me at ever-increasing distances as I move along. But we've separated too soon; suddenly I hear the voices of children. I call her back, feigning a treat in my closed fist, which works for once, and put her on the leash. I continue on; at the switchback we see two women and two toddlers, one carried, one pulled behind on a blue plastic toboggan. There are gruff "Hello's" as we pass.

Wary, I keep my pup restrained, and sure enough, at the top of the hill, after the turn, comes a tall, old woman.

"You must have seen . . . " she inquires, "a group of four?"

"Oh yes, " I respond. "They're up ahead." By this woman, I am almost taken in: her stature, white hair, knobby walking stick, big coat open at the neck; she might be mother nature herself.

But I must confess: I abhor a busy trail.

One more turn, and I take a stand. By the deep kettle where two summers ago Betsy met a skunk, where last summer she treed a raccoon, from the bottom of which, in a month, spring peepers will call, I let her go once and for all.

When I get to the stream, she has already leapt across, and I am pleased to see, in spite of the warm weather that has crowded my trail, the stream is for the first time this winter completely frozen over. Imprisoned by last week's subzero temperatures, on its short path from one lake to the next, the stream reminds me of recent cold winter walks when Betsy had to sit down every few steps to lick the ice from her paws, and we passed no one.

Turning to the left, I see a lone ice fisherman pulling his sled from the lake, and so we must press on. There is a downed branch another half mile into the woods, along a spur trail, just before the hole a family of foxes inhabited for a brief period not last May but two Mays ago. I like to sit on the downed branch. We will find solitude there, I know. Betsy leads the way.

I brush the four inches or so of fresh snow from the branch--so rotten I worry it will not hold my weight--and sit down to rest. There is something you hear in a forest when no one else is around; it comes to you like vibrations must come through the water to the lateral line on a fish. It dissolves you into whatever medium a forest is. When you rise, a layer has been sloughed off, and it is not so bad passing people on the way out as it was on the way in.

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.