An August Walk In The Woods

 I had not intended to take a walk - after all, I had things to do  before I returned back to the life that continued on without me this weekend, the whirling and scrambling of the modern world currently past my sight and sound.  But the morning remained too cool and beautiful to ignore its allure and the chairos - that Greek word for "moment in time" - might never come again.

And so, I walked.

The dampness of the soil belied the dry brown of the native grasses that is typical here in August, the last long pull before Autumn comes with the distant promise of the rains of Winter.  The combination of my foot sinking into the soil and the crackle of grass as I walk which should not have arrived for another three months or so strikes me for its incongruity.

The morning is clean and cool, the overcasting clouds that brought rain the day before departed.  The world has a fresh cast to it as it often does after such a rain, the sort of thing that I think should always happen after a rain but so seldom does.

I walk along the Long Road, the road that is - per the property lines - the actual deeded driveway here.  It has never been used as such as long as my family has been on this land as we have always used the shorter route across the other properties that surround this island of sanity - or at least we have been using it since the 1940's.   The right of way is now so established that if one is to electronically map this location, the name of the dirt and gravel road will be that of The Ranch.  One of the few times that tradition supersedes modernity.

It comes to mind I never told TB the Elder that.  He probably would have just listened and nodded his head, knowing that simply was the way it was always meant to be.

The detrius of Winter has been cleaned out as I walk, likely by The Cowboy and The Young Cowboy.  One can clearly now see the areas where new growth is going on, where trees have fallen and allowed the great Battle of Light of The Forest Floor that has been going on for ages to begin its eternal renewal.

Across the Lower Meadow the remaining horse looks up from his grazing at me, wondering if I am food bearer or close enough to be one.  It grazes away with the cattle now:  a pair of deaths this year left it the sole survivor of its kinds. From a distance I cannot tell if the cattle are an acceptable substitute.

I wander my way down as the canopy overtakes the road.   It muffles the noise well enough, allowing the idea that I move through a muffled green tunnel pushing out all but the sounds that belong here.

As I approach the Lower Gate, the sign of the limits of our property adjoining the others, I surprised to see a small black and white form working its way of the road:  A skunk making its way to wherever skunks go at this time of the day, oblivious to me as I was to it.  It makes its odd lope up the road - front back front back - its tail bobbing a second after its body.

I attempt to shoe it away with my voice but the skunk remains strangely unmoved by my verbal commands.  I stand my ground for a moment - then carefully work my way up on the side of the road; no sense in reckless courage.  I wait for a bit but the skunk does not come by.  I finally peer back down to find that skunk has not advanced.  It sees me and begins making its way down the trail - periodically stopping to turn its back to me and raise its tail.  Familiar enough with the old stories, I wait patiently until something on the road grabs its attention, perhaps a last minute meal.  

I will not make the Lower Gate today.

The Lower Gate.  In a way the end of the world here, just as the front gate that we pass through on our way in with its metal arch that gives the name of this place and the names of my parents is the entrance.  The Main Gate is welcoming in that sense, a celebration of always coming.  The Lower Gate is not so with its single cattle panel design:  "Beyond me lies monsters" it always seems to say to me.

I realize in a brief moment of awareness that there was time that I believe in monsters, and then a time that I did not.  Now, I realize, I believe in them again - even more.

I start making my way back up the road, always an enlightening activity as it seems seldom that I actually avail myself of the opportunity to look at the same things but from the reverse side.   In a city or urban area this is much less of a thing:  houses and landscaping and industrial parks seldom change for the better no matter how you look at them.  Here, change is common and and almost everywhere I look, presenting me with small tableaus and frozen moments completely unexposed to me as I head down.

As I pass a fat pine tree,  I realize our local variety of "Poison X"  is turning red as if if were already Autumn.  That it would be such a forerunner seems odd to me; that it is doing this is not comforting, perhaps signs of a bad Winter in-bound. My Great Aunt who owned this property, with her extended memory almost back 100 years, might have recalled.

As I make my way back down the road the House rises up above the bottom of small hill that it sits on, framed by the living green and brown of trees on a dry brown canvas of spent grasses.  The sun dapples through the trees as the cerulean blue sky sits behind it:  a testament, the physical remaining testament as it were, of the land here and my parents' love of it and their intent in some way to see it preserved.

Sighing, I begin the trudge up the hill.  The world awaits me.