Under construction
J20160422-1500 April
22, 2016 Earth Day 3 PM Metro Beach, that is St. Clair Metropark. When I
got in the car after leaving Dr. John's office, piano music came on the radio that
was so incredibly beautiful that I burst into tears and cried practically all
the way up to Metro Beach. It was Bach's partita for keyboard number three (in
G major[?])—so beautiful. The day before yesterday I burst out crying when I
saw a whole bunch of flowering trees, the first flowering trees that I really
seen so abundantly flowering this spring and it was just so gorgeous that I
began to cry. Sometimes I wonder if I cry too easily.
I failed to bring either a camera with a long
lens or a water bottle; I was too intent on dressing for being weighed by Dr.
John who is very scary.
I am at the pond now watching geese cropping
grass. There's a very large fish, probably carp, thrashing around in the
cattails. I saw robins, red-winged blackbirds, a woodpecker and cardinals. I
failed to bring any binoculars, so I can't look at anything up close. It's very
windy and it's pretty cloudy still but it seems warmer, maybe just because the
sun is out. A muskrat just emerged from where I thought there was a carp blundering
around, a small muskrat. It swam directly toward me. I'm sitting close to the
edge of the water and it swam toward me to within 3 feet of me and then
continued on behind me. I got an extremely good look at it, but didn't dare try
to take a picture, not that I have any good cameras with me anyways, but I was
very excited.
I've been running a gauntlet of geese on the
berm trail around the pond. They've been hissing, and I was afraid they would
attack, but so far, they have not.
I notice that I use a LOT more words when I
dictate rather than type, and the dictation software is unreliable. It requires much editing later, if I can even
figure out what I had said that was misinterpreted by the software.
I was almost a candidate for America's funniest
home videos, only luckily, no one was nearby taking videos, hopefully. A goose
came at me hissing and flapping its wings and I was afraid because I've been
attacked by geese before, and it hurts, so I picked up the sides of my shirt
and flapped them like giant wings and hissed. It was still coming at me, so I
hissed louder and flapped harder and the goose finally retreated and went into
the pond.
It sure does my heart good, though, to see the
ducks and geese flying in and out and the big fat baby owl sitting on the side
of its nest. Too bad I do not have a camera up to the task of capturing any of
this, especially the owl. If that's the second baby the first one may have
already left the nest. I only see one baby and I don't know if it's the first
one and the second one lying down, or if it's the second one.
The nettles are up 4 to 6 inches, so I have to
be very careful where I step with my sandals.
The swallows are back. I'm not sure what they
are eating because there aren’t too many insects out right now specially in
this wind.
A pretty, skinny lady dressed in pink says, “What
a gorgeous day and it's great to be back out,” and I agreed, even though I've
been out all along, all winter.
The terns are circling the pond and chattering,
and it makes me think of Little Hog Island and it makes me want to work on my
novel. I could work out here because I have it on the phone, but I need to
finish my walk and go home because Keith will be coming home and want dinner
and Graham be wanting dinner and so on. (I didn’t have any lunch, so I’m fairly
hungry, too!) I'm sitting near a muskrat house but I don't see any muskrats
although something splashed in the water nearby.
I climb to the promontory and sit on the rocks
and my mind is going snap, snap, snap, snap taking bunches of imaginary
pictures: a goose standing on a fallen log at the water's edge in silhouette
against the brightness of sky and water and another goose in the water beside
it and the shining horizon stretched out as far as the eye can see, no land in
sight across the water, the sun reflecting on polished aluminum water, a group
of fishermen walking along the shore among the trees and then splitting up to
look for spots to fish, and again, the bright path of sunlight reflecting off
the lake, the terns circling.
I'm having one of those expansive moments I rarely
have anywhere but out in nature.
I'd like to give that soliloquy to Dana in LHI.
Okay, I'd better head home.
Let me first, though, mention the sounds, the
trilling of wood frogs and chorus frogs and redwing blackbirds, the cacophony
of other bird song, the wind in the branches making a quiet subtle roaring
sound. There are geese honking ducks quacking, squirrels chattering and under
it all, the wood frogs and chorus frogs. And toads trilling, too.
