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09 December ~2009

It has been cold lately, not getting much above 10 degrees for several days, with lows well below zero. The dogs and I went out walking tonight anyway, down the hill to the eleven cottonwoods. There was enough light on the snow that I didn't have to use my lamp.

My steps crunched as I crossed the wood bridge at the base of the hill, where the snow stays all winter. Ben dropped once in a while to bite the ice out of his paws. Mollie ran across the meadow and back again and again, working off her 16-month old puppy energy.

I wore my weighted down pack, to maintain the strength in my back and legs that gets me up to all those places that few people ever see.

We walked on the frog pond, frozen rock solid, and I thought of all those spring peepers that are down in the mud under the ice. We went over to the big lake and on the ice along its edge. I made the dogs stay close, not being certain how solid the ice was in the middle.

On the way back I stopped by the old Cottonwood, and looked up to see the stars visible through its branches. I sense a mystery there, something beyond my knowing but positive and renewing.

I took Ben down there when he was a puppy, as well as Maggie and Mollie when they were little black and white pups. I held little Mollie up against the bark of the tree then, which I figured was a good christening to her life with me, and the adventure and freedom and love of wildness that was in her future.

It's good to have a home ground, a place where you return to let go of your memories, to acknowledge a hope for the future, to pause for a moment to give thanks for another day of health.

I got cold and we went home to make popcorn and watch a movie. Ben, Maggie, and Mollie sit alert, waiting for the handfuls of popcorn that I drop their way. When it is gone Mollie and Ben sleep on the couch beside me, with Maggie at my feet.

 

 
The groves were God's first temples.  ~William Cullen Bryant, "

Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.  ~John Muir