Animals

In Love #25

I’m in love with muddy deer prints. Tails of trails. Fresh or frequent. Five minutes or forever long ago. They play and stray. Misses or misters making their mark. No worries. Creatures of grace and wonder, long lashes and lean bodies.

Feeling honored that they share my space. Or is it that I share their space? Soggy wetlands and paths yet to be forged. Their presence welcomed and apparent. My arrival, in the woods, as stealth as I can muster and still they notice me. Before I spy them. Stillness if only for their nostrils’ mist, their hooves sinking, snapping branches, crunching brown leaves.

Prints more frequent in the Spring thaw. New growth, juicy buds, spruce tips, cedar tips, arborvitae fronds. The fragrance of enticing treats pulling them closer for a nibble. Through the cyclic mushy, then frozen earth, their signature on the land preserved

snow

In Love #22

Photo by afishnamedkaren

I’m in love with snowy silence. White wrapped muffled fuzzies or is it fuffled muzzies? Either will do on such an occasion as this. Blankets of frozen warming me with fond memories. Memories of younger days. Much younger days after the storm. The sky purging all its discards. Heavy, thick, frozen air pausing life. Muting color. Halting movement. Muffling audio. Witnessing the world losing its voice.

Ready. Standing outside. My puffy fluffer snowsuit, 2 sizes too large, insulating me from the harshness. Rosy cheeks, hand-me-down winter boots and 10 cent knitted church bazaar hat. Ready for all of it. The silence deafening. I breathe in the crisp, freshness. I barely notice my chest making small movements under the layers.

My little person body filling, cleansing and clearing. But I know it always does. Without efforting or worry or pressure. It just happens. The freshness streaming to my lungs. Filling them with silence. The stillness then warmed and released to find its way out unobstructed. Completely.

Motionless on the deserted and speechless sidewalk. I wait. And listen. For nothing and everything. Sounds of silence disturbing and delighting me. The emptiness got me full. A snowblower in the distance. Scrape of a metal shovel. All is lost. All is found. All is well. I stand, frozen, listening for nothing. I hear it. The silence. The snowy silence.