On Saturday we made an unexpected, fast trip to central New York to see my parents and try to help out while my mother is in the hospital. We're still here and expecting to be here for a few more days. In spite of the difficulty of seeing people I love having to go through suffering - and being helpless to stop it - I'm grateful to be here, and for the time we're spending together. It has also been one of loveliest springs I can remember. To get to the hospital, in Cooperstown, New York, we drive east over the hills from the Chenango Valley into the Unadilla Valley, and then over another set of hills to the valley filled by Otsego Lake. The road winds and curves around farms and streams and sedimentary outcrops, through hills now green as Ireland with newly-grown clover. Flocks of deer lift their heads in the middle of meadows and keep grazing, unconcerned. The pastoral landscape constantly varies - here a farm with a little orchard and a barn with an old cobblestone foundation; there a barnyard with goats and chickens and a flock of cows heading up the hill after milking; now an uninterrupted stretch of woods giving way to a high wild area with a swamp and a beaver dam at one end. I find myself nearly gasping as one scene unfolds after another, even though it's all familiar from years past, and know I'll never stop loving this particular configuration of rocks and soil and vegetation that will always represent home.
As I walked along the lake this morning, three fat large-mouth bass swam in the clear water just off shore. The sun was so bright, shining toward me from the east, that it made the body of the smallest fish translucent. One fish then turned and lazily swam toward me so that I could see both eyes at once, glinting orange. I waved my arms but the glare on the water favored me; the fish turned again and swam off, unperturbed. This scene -- the shoreline and myself, looking into the water -- are a recurrent dream, and today I felt myself shifting between partially-remembered dream sequences and the real interplay of lake-life and observer. These dreams are sometimes disturbing, and always strange -- I'm quite sure the water represents my unconscious mind -- and I've never fully understood them. I left the shore after a while and walked across the road to the woods, and followed a deer trail through the undergrowth to the edge where the woods give way to a farmer's meadow. The deer had been there last night, from the looks of the fresh scat and scuffled earth under a copse of thorn apples. I backtracked, looking for hepaticas, and found their leaves and some spent blossoms under a tree where they've always grown. I sat down then, with my back against the the tree, and gazed across a sea of white trillium. I was there a pretty long time, long enough for the woods to settle once again into my eyes and heart, creating a strong memory of the white blossoms; the scent of the warming earth under its cover of leaves; the pair of warblers overhead in the budded branches of a hickory, singing the spring.
