On creatures great and small
and a day of perfect idleness
“Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another — why don’t you get going?”
“Incoming!” says my spouse Janyce calling from the kitchen door. Moments later, our exuberant dog comes barreling into the bedroom, nails clicking on the hardwood floor, springing onto the bed, landing all four paws on my body—a foot on my neck, a wet mouth licking my face. It’s Saturday morning at the Cape house. Janyce and I made what turned out to be a four-hour journey after work yesterday, driving only the back roads and stopping twice, while our anxious dog yawned and panted and trembled and sat up and then sat down, licked the back of the car seats incessantly, and finally gave up the fight as the sun began to dip below the tree line, resting her head between her paws and looking down toward the floor.
“I think she’s doing great, even if she is refusing to eat her dog food,” says Janyce, pouring milk and coffee into two oversized ceramic mugs.
I get up from bed to move into the living room, to lean back into the couch pillows with my feet up, and to study the light of the morning filtering in through the windows. We have a full weekend of nothing. Nothing we have to do. Nowhere we have to go. This is the first time we have been to the house since Swirly arrived in January. We could go to the beach today, but we decide against it.
“Remember that small looped walk in the woods, the Chatham conservation land? Let’s go there,” I say.
Last week, Woodman returned to our yard just long enough for me to snap a photo of him. Swirly alerted us to his return by sitting at the window trembling, ears standing straight up and alert. I’m thinking about him now and the barred owls we heard hooting in the back woods. Two of them calling back and forth to each other as early as 4pm this week, now that the season is changing, the days getting shorter, darkness coming sooner. I’m thinking about the creatures great and small that I love to discover on these wooded walks with our dog.
I’m also thinking about a favorite Mary Oliver poem called Black Oaks.
Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary, or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance and comfort. Not one can manage a single sound though the blue jays carp and whistle all day in the branches, without the push of the wind. But to tell the truth after a while I’m pale with longing for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen and you can’t keep me from the woods, from the tonnage of their shoulders, and their shining green hair. Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a little sunshine, a little rain. Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another — why don’t you get going? For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees. And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.
