Outside

A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked. ~Anais Nin

I came across a completely beautiful (and completely dead) cicada while on a walk with my girl. It now clings to the side of a nest in my home office.

We walked. The rivulets running across the path were choked with layers of leaves, mud and twigs, and thick, dark clumps stuck to the sides of my boots. I hugged my camera to my belly and hopped across rocks through deeper, freely running waters. They ran ahead, but I lingered at the sides of the path. Brittle mushroom skins covered a tree with brown, curling scales. I stooped to feel moss and bark. I turned to admire an empty peanut shell in a hollow. A single red berry clung to the end of a dark red, thorny stem. I heard their voices calling to me from deep within the wood. I looked up, and found that I was alone.

A sign hangs at the beginning of the long driveway, but I only catch the first word, Woods, white painted letters on dark pine. We pass fenced pastures dotted with small barns and stands of tall trees, only tufts of orange and brown leaves left at their very tops, their bodies spare streaks below. The horses lift their heads as we pass. We park under an old maple and haul folding chairs, blankets, and backpacks holding flashlights and sweatshirts past the farm house and into the back yard where the gathering has started. ...

We weren’t really lost; we could see the house just across the cove. But the fields were so very cold and muddy, and the winds came off the water and whipped stinging sand at our eyes and mouths, making the evening seem desperate and epic. And so our thoughts and conversation turned to fire and food and warmth and shelter. The Muscari pushed toward the sunset, unfeeling, insensitive to our struggle for survival.

I found it at the edge of the Atlantic, lifeless, grey, sliding in the foam. The pain of the frigid waters shot up my legs as I darted in to pluck the ocean’s dead from her shallows. The white last now sits on my window sill, the trophy of a landlocked housewife.

The walking path was covered with seed pods. The kids thought they looked like alien faces. They found a squirrel’s nest that had fallen from a tree and poked it with sticks, looking for life. Most everything along the path was brown and grey, except for bright green patches of moss at the base of some trees, and the river itself, colored green by long ribbons of algae that quivered in the current.

I do like this time of year, when the outside colors are shifting from vibrance to reserve, diving deeper down into their end season. I, for one, think grays and browns are quite lovely, and bittersweet.

It was hard work. I had to lift heavy pine branches over my head to finish the lean-to, and while I held still to staple the sides of the tee pees, the mosquitoes nearly ate my face off. In fact, one bit me on the left side of my lower lip, and I have been doing dead-on Silvester Stallone impressions all afternoon. Adriaaaaaaan! I wanted to tell them no, because I am old and tired and over-caffeinated. But this was the first weekend after the first week of a new school year, the end of the first week of our new days spent more apart than together. So I said yes instead. Yes, I will play with you. Yes, I like what you do. Yes, I love you.