Crouched Low & Smiling

"Actually, the best gift you could have given her
was a lifetime of adventures…" - Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)


The sky doesn't keep secrets and today it hints of snow.  I remember the summer that my neighbor's grandfather came to stay. I was a little girl then and he seemed older than the earth itself.  I ran to chat him up whenever I spied him outside.  We chewed wild mint whilst he taught me how to decode cryptograms and showed me how the leaves of certain trees turn upside down before a rain. "When leaves show their undersides, be very sure that rain betides", he'd say. I never forgot that. Although he left earth decades ago, his memory lingers still…in certain shades of sky, in the leaves, and in the wild mint that I grow outside every home I've ever lived in.

Early this morning, I pour myself a cup of coffee spiced with cinnamon and cloves then hold the cup with both hands, warming my fingers as I walk downstairs to my workshop.   I sit at my worktable and turn the chair toward the glass door then wait quietly while sipping my morning brew. Suddenly, as if by magic, the fox emerges from the woods. A smile spreads across my face like a sunrise.



Yesterday, while searching the forest for fallen tree limbs, I happened upon an animal path. I followed it to the bank of a twisty creek and there in wet mud I saw fresh fox tracks. I crouched low and pressed my hand into the mud beside it.