2 resolutions : Thirty-nine

Tim had something else to do today and as I couldn't bear the gym on my own I decided to tramp through the snowy meadow with my ghost dog instead. This field belongs to someone else, but it is MY meadow, well mine and Molly's really. Molly could not wait to get there every day. I learned to run in the meadow. It has heard all my joys and sorrows, comforted me when my mother died, and later my father. I tell the bees and then the meadow when something momentous happens. I know all its seasons, all its moods. It is a beautiful piece of open land in the middle of the forest, a refuge I have been visiting almost every day for nearly nine years now.

I planned on a brisk half-hour trudge through the deep snow, but arrived back an hour and a half later.

This is some of what kept me there for so long:

The wispiest of soft clouds in a wide blue sky with a sun you could feel.

A little plump mourning dove, one of the most successful birds ever. 20 million are shot as game birds each year in the US and yet they continue to thrive. The mourning dove is Wisconsin's state symbol of peace, and yet I am sure that Wisconsin has dove-hunters too. Shooting the symbol of peace doesn't seem like such a great idea.

Mouse footprints like handwriting in the snow. Footwriting.

Pattern in the snow, but I have no idea what made it. An aspiring mouse artist?

I love to inspect all the tracks to see if I can guess what they are. I can see when a deer has just been ambling along, or when it galloped. I love to see the small prints of fisher and coyote, and where the little squirrels with their beautiful long feet have scurried across the snow, when they are not streaming along the canopy highways overhead.

patterns

My camera battery died just before I saw a horde of bluejays land in the tree nearby. Then a red-tailed hawk took flight just ahead of me, and a little black-capped chickadee sang her song almost in my ear! I was so sad that my battery had died, but then consoled myself with the whole 'living in the moment' thing, and how you don't really do that if you are always framing the experience through a lens. But then I thought, well, sometimes you want to preserve the moment. You are still living it, only with a photograph you can re-live it again and again.

At one stage there was blood all over the snow and I fully believed a massacre had taken place and that pretty soon I would find the grizzly remains. But there was nothing, and eventually I realized that I was standing under a group of sumac trees, which have as their fruit (called drupes :-)) a brownish-crimson triangular mass which is apparently ground and used as a lemony spice in Arab countries. The birds and deer obviously eat this as a last resort and someone had had a sumac feast in the snow!

I am somewhat obsessed with the panorama function on my phone's camera. So brilliant, so easy, and you can show much more of your perception of the experience, rather than a narrow view. I suppose it can also be a metaphor, the importance of seeing the BIG picture, instead of focusing on a more limited perspective.