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guy: there are three kinds of people here-
artists, musicians, and people with two dogs.
me: you know what that means.
anne: yup. gotta get another dog.
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now entering the high country
[sign outside nederland]
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I took Norah to West Magnolia today, both of us needing to run off the adrenaline backed up in our systems, electricity pounding in our blood, poised to crash through a riot of fall foliage. But we got the the trailhead and the land and sky had silently reversed, broken branches overhead, leaves sheathing the ground. I stood still for a moment while she danced ahead, feeling like I'd just missed a train, wondering about the feeling in my bones. When did they fall? I wanted to ask the tree next to me, asleep, utterly unconcerned. And why does it make me feel this way? It's just winter.-
I trudge through the leaves while she streaks down the trail, stopping, turning, undulating, this ever-quivering black comma flitting against the gunsmoke tree bark. Silver aspen bodies spear the sky and hold it there, stock-still and unprotesting, as if under contract. The clouds drift in slow motion. I don't realize I've stopped breathing until Norah reappears, bumping my side, and my breath squeaks out as fog, twists and disappears in the air.
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They're dead, I tell her, while she noses under the leaves, and I hear that hopeless edge in my voice, the one that comes out when the seasons take this turn. There's this certainty lodged somewhere under my skin that you can't get dead things back, and for that reason I'm always braced for my last autumn.
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We walk for a while before I notice the sunlight on my neck. It feels crisp but also secretive, and so I look up for the first time just as we crest a ridge. It lights up everything past the forest. For the first time, I can see through the trees.
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The mountains spread out beyond, rose, yellow, glacial blue, white streaks of snow running in rivulets down their crevasses like veins. They stand back from the rest of the world spiralling into winter like ancient guardians, assessing the damage. Look, I tell Norah, but she's fixated on the dead and dying underfoot. The fact that everything else is slumbering makes these distant behemoths seem even more sharply awake, watchful, backlit by the winter sift light.
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It made me back off a little from my opposition with death. It made winter feel less like a mistake and more like the forgotten birth mother, the real beginning, just with a terrible publicist. I want to remember that there is no despair in the season that sings itself to sleep, that builds a foundation underground by giving itself over to dreams. I want to learn to foster this quiet in my deep, in my forests, learn to let the leaves fall so the mountains can rise.
