Long views

Back at the little town library for the afternoon. It's a cozy space, home away from home. I fished my young double off the YA shelf and placed her back on the windowsill where she belongs.

It is very cold and grey today. I woke up this morning desiring to write something especially beautiful. Too tall an order. My journal page remained blank as I imagined summer, the garden in bloom, cosmos and buddleia in vases all over the house.

Salad for lunch, red leaf lettuce, tuna, tomato, and onion, and feta and olives from Sahadi's in Brooklyn. Lovely light fare, and for a moment, summer. On my walk at the conservation area I recalled how the paths looked last June, overgrown with roses scenting the air. The goldenrod now is dry and spent but not so long ago it was in bloom along with purple wild asters. I've been walking there for a year and a half now, I've seen the cycle of the seasons turn over, and know they will again.

I was thinking how in winter we used to take walks in the ice and snow around your pond and you pointed out skunk cabbage to me. There was a lake at Wellesley that I used to walk around too, and I looked for it there. Then I moved to Oakland and there was a beautiful large lake, Lake Merritt, across the street from my apartment. No skunk cabbage, or snow or ice ever, but pelicans! They hovered in mid-air and plunged below the surface for fish. Here, no pelicans, but yesterday a hawk circled by me and tipped its wings, as if in greeting. I think I keep seeing the same one, and I believe it recognizes me. Its gesture struck me as deliberate. I felt that it wanted me to see it. Hawks generally seem like very deliberate creatures, what with the long view they can take from their encompassing vantage point.