Sunday Morning

9am Sunday, 11/24. Weather fair; clear skies, a light breeze. Temperature 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Heading steeply uphill on foot in a mixed deciduous forest. Ears, nose, cheeks, lips tingling in a tug-of-war, heat production v. heat loss, work them.  Move them. Enlist them. They’re your body parts, and you’ve committed them.

They arrive at the top, a plateau, an open forest of beech and boulders and the rare white light of a clear late November morning.

You brought them here to see this, this stillness, Nature in repose. Forests laying low, waiting for snow, waiting for Spring.

The faint drone of a distant airplane disappears as you move, parting a path in the deep tan leaves. The dry rustle assumes a cadence as you walk, passing the silent sentinels of the past

This is why you don’t have a good job in the city. This is why you live here.

This is your life.