Oxbow Park on Saturday. The weather was absolutely perfect — cool and cloudy and still, still, still, the light flat and clear. We puttered near the beach then hiked a little trail into the forest I've always wanted to wander. All the leaves hung like mobiles, gently turning, or not even turning at all. The woods smell so good. It was wet, which was good. Mushrooms bloomed like fairy umbrellas, a different kind at every turn. Rain-soaked moss glowed green against the soaked soil. Our girl ran fast and sure down the trail. She's happy here, and my heart explodes into a confetti of pine needles and tiny acorns. She picks up things to show me. She puts her sorrel dollies to bed on a log under her dad's ever-present bandanna. High above, out of sight, we hear birds. I try to stop her to listen, which she does, for a short moment. But mostly she is high on freedom, zinging along down the path, turning around to go back to something she saw, trilling her own special song, sometimes serious and quiet but mostly prancing, dancing. Suddenly, a tiny winged creature whips into the tangle of bracken and branch. I stop in my tracks and look for it, and see it for a second, settled on a tiny tree. In another second it is off, shooting lower into the brush. I strain to see it again, but I don't — the tiniest bird I think I've ever seen, hardly bigger than a moth! What was it? Brownish gray, and very round, like a flying baby mouse? A bushtit, perhaps, but extra small? I'm so charmed I can hardly move. I would venture into the fairy circle at that moment, following, I feel quite sure.
Sometimes I think I'd like to bring a chair, and sit. It's not the walking so much as the being inside the forest that I like. The woods are so dense, the trails so skinny, with drop-offs and margin-less shoulders, at least where we go, that there's really no place for just sitting. I'd probably feel self conscious, parking a chair on the trail, if someone came by (and someone always comes by). But if I could, I'd sit in the chair with my feet up, and watch, and listen. I'd sit very still, and wait. I'd hope for something to ignore me, and get close. I'd hold my camera in my lap and use the articulated LCD screen to see something if I wanted to take its picture so that I wouldn't have to raise my arms and scare it off. Amelia would wander and find a place to be alone, talking to herself and making dolls out of pine cones and petals, houses of rocks and wood. Andy would probably lie back and look up at the trees. I hope I can find a place, just a little place, where we can do this all alone. I'd like to stop, and sit, and think, and listen, listen to the birds and my girl's sweet voice in the forest, and watch instead of move.
