Thirteen Months
If you’re all about the quiet, the best time to walk the land is 10:17a.m. on pretty much any weekday, or Sunday morning around 7:35. In late May. After Patrick has smoothed off the path with the mower the previous afternoon.
As the pandemic subsides and we gradually emerge from our cocooned manner of living, my current paid gig with health insurance and other benefits likes to see me at the main office M - F by 8:30 latest. To get there on time, my daily walking Ritual needs to begin right at the same time the good residents of Mt Vernon come flying down the two-lane road that connects them with their respective employment destinations. We’re tucked back about a mile from this flurry behind a thick wall of tree line and farm fields but for all the tires whining on the asphalt in rapid succession, occasional horn-honking and jake-braking, you’d think I was running alongside. I don’t mind. I’ll be joining them right after I shower and pack my lunch, earning an honest living that lets me begin and end my days in a landlocked lap of beauty that just keeps on giving.
But on the weekends (Sundays only during farmers’ market season) I let the first light of day pull me from beneath the covers and away from Patrick’s steady breathing to move my feet gently through the grass and join the silence of the woods on the one day of the week I’d be allowed to sleep in. It’s worth it.
I’m coming up on a full year of walking the land nearly daily (see “Survival” from February 7 for a more detailed account of the knee-deep snowfall that kept my orbit smaller for about five weeks) and have committed to memory the subtleties of how she unpacks and arranges her day. Before the sun’s shoulders lift the sky’s cover of darkness (on the clock that would be around 5:20a.m.), the birds are already at it, trying to out-sing each in relentlessly cheerful fashion and I can barely hear my own thoughts so I suppose it’s best not to think at all and just be drenched in their sound (I haven’t used an alarm clock for going on ten years). Any straggling raccoons wrapping up their night’s activities are making their way through the creek as I pass by and barely register the swish of my footsteps through the sawgrass that’s too close to the banks for Patrick to mow safely without tumbling into the drink. A tawny doe raises her head and looks right at me, daring me to move. Had I slept five minutes longer or lingered over the morning dishes we’d have missed each other. Timing is everything if you want to see stuff around here.
Then, around 7:12a.m., as if muted by some hidden universal remote, the full-chorus cacophony is replaced by the random calls of towhees and mockingbirds in a polite back-and-forth discussion about the current events unfolding on the forest floor. Observed from their perch in the growing-ever-more-lush canopy, their commentary is succinct and accurate. I walk carefully beneath their conversation with my head down and my ears on high alert, grateful for the surgery I had back in 2004 to replace both stapes bones (a stapedectomy, if you’re wondering) with delicate platinum prosthetics that would fit perfectly on the tip on my pinky. Thanks to those 4mm lengths of metal, I can hear what matters to the birds.
This morning I stood at the place by the creek where it bends and slopes through the meadow on it’s way toward the bridge and remembered the snow that just two months ago thickly covered the leafless arms of the towering black walnuts and sycamores along the banks. The clear cold water had sung itself across the rocks as I rested my hands on my hickory walking stick, eyes closed and following the sound with my heartbeat. Can this really be the same place? Tall stalks of wild grasses and hogweed have now turned the scene Jurassic and the water has slowed to a trickle; I have to strain those well-placed platinum filaments to hear it. But I do because that’s the arrangement we have each morning. She whispers and I listen.
For thirteen months, I slowly knitted my day’s activities and routines to hers, working from home as advised and allowed. Such a gift, to witness the unspooling of the days from both sides of the windows of our humble home. Her rhythms intimately became my own and we learned much about each other. Winter felt longer because I had a 24/7 front row seat for its performance, interrupted by sleep and daily work-focused screen time. But even as I replied to emails, I knew what she was about. It seeped through the walls, poured in through the curtains and filled each room right into the corners where the spiders napped between meals. I came to know what the stand of volunteer mulberry saplings looked like at 10:17a.m. and 2:30p.m., saw the sun slowly shift its rising position as the earth rotated and turned its face toward another spring equinox. For the first time since we lived here, I really lived here, inhaling the days’ work and exhaling the nights’ peacefulness. I can’t recall feeling more attentive and awake. The only other living being who gets this much of me is Patrick.
It’s going on six weeks now, commuting again to my windowless office only eighteen miles away, but it feels like the other side of the world. I know the land gets along quite well without me, but I hope she misses me a little. I imagine the towhees and mockingbirds swapping stories while I interview volunteer applicants and print copies of their TB test results for their files. Salamanders I can’t see are darting across the wet stones of the creek bed where it bends through the meadow and the ebony wings of a laughing crow catch the sun’s rays, turning them iridescently purple and midnight blue for a flash of a second. Between virtual meetings and Medicare reports, ants move miniscule bits of soil and oak leaves transform sunlight into food, hoping the locusts arriving this year will pass them by. We’ve all got work to do, don’t we?
Until I no longer need to leave this place to pay for this place, I will hold in my full heart thirteen months’ worth of sacred images and sounds that have forever changed the way I understand the pulse of creation. I can’t tell where she ends and I begin, and so I’m going to stop trying.
It’s far better to just wake up, put on my boots, and keep walking.
