Saturday, May 20, 2006

Clearing 

The past week's constant downpour has turns into a series of overcast days, sprinkled with sunshine and an ocasional cloudburst. Streamwater runs yellow with washed-away pollen. The rains still come, but it's clearing.

Spent the bulk of the day cutting brush along the road at the base of our property: red birch, knee-high maples, here and there a few scattered oak tree shoots still red with new leaves. Something that might be poison ivy.

The birch smells like summer camp, birch beer and earth and boysweat coming home from a weekly trip into town, when you cut into the green trunk.

In the overgrowth behind the brick wall an old garden, a hidden legacy from our new home's previous owners: six fat ridges of straberries in flower, tall blueberry bushes, rhubarb low and redstemmed, thick brambles on their way towards something sticky and red.

I let the garden stand, for now.

By the driveway I unearthed a tiny red painted turtle, quarter-length shell emerging from the leaves like a moving sunspot. We put it in a mixing bowl on the counter, wet earth and leaves halfway up the slippery glass, a place of terrapin comfort amindst alien marble and artificial lighting.

Later before sunset we walked down the road, past the new calf and the waterfall, to where the slowmoving water backs up against the wrong side of the dam, and let it go. Willow cried, struggling to understand the ways of the wild. I held her hand as we left for home, and watched over her shoulder as it scrabbled back towards us, away from the water, a speck in the grass heading for the woods just as fast as its little legs could carry it.

posted by boyhowdy | 8:21 PM |

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