There perhaps it had once seen us stop;
All that morning, nobody stopped.
“Do you realize it’s going to be 80 degrees on Friday?” says my spouse Janyce, looking over her screen from where she is sitting and working at the kitchen table. I’m standing at the window over the sink, pouring coffee, and watching the mourning dove perched and fluffed up, sitting so sweetly and quietly on the side of the bush.
“She’s definitely got a nest in there,” I say. “Hi baby.”
“The robins have a nest in the other bush, too,” says Janyce.
Summer is indeed on its way, and the yard is showing signs of completely breaking free— awash as it is right now in a sea of florescent green and heady with the floral perfume of lilacs and crab apple blossoms. But today at least, spring is still holding on. It’s barely 50 degrees this morning and the windy sky is a dull white.
I’ve climbed back into the bed with my cup and my laptop for another hour or so before the start of the day. Our dog has jumped on the bed again, too. This is something she’s done several times already only to immediately jump back off, ears pinned back, trotting towards the door again in her enigmatic way, while her nails make short staccato clipping sounds on the hardwood floor. She wants to go out. But, she also doesn’t want to go out. She can’t resist curling up somewhere and sleeping in.
This week, on our silent dog walks in the woods around the swampy pond, we have watched a whole slew of creatures waking up— like the tiny mink that scurried across the bridge in daylight to get to the clumpy grasses on the other side, and the bevy of red-winged blackbirds, hopping and clacking in the tall reeds that line the water’s edge. We’ve stared at the turtles piled on top of each others’ shells, balancing precariously like a Jenga tower on the bits of log jutting out from the surface. We’ve stopped to listen to the owls hooting, even in the day, and jumped back at the sound of rustling brush to let the snake cross the path at our feet and slink back into the mound of dried leaves on the other side. And we were mesmerized for long stretches of time watching the beavers at the end of the day traversing the pond, tiny noses peeking up above the water, trailing a single ripple behind them.
I’ve managed to slow down quite a bit during these silent walks. It’s been needed, and necessary, and I’m not quite done with the whole idea of doing nothing right now, either. Outside the wind is gusting, bending the maple branches and whipping around the wind chimes. I look down at my notes. I don’t want to write about any of the human realities in the world this morning. They’ll still be here next week. Instead I’ll leave you with a fitting poem about slowing down and simply noticing. I found it recently in an online poetry site aptly named “Form in Formless Times”.
The Buck Stops
A buck stopped here last Saturday early,
Just as the streets were turning blue.
A fine six-pointer, bronzed and burly:
What had it come for? Nobody knew.
It took its stand at the central bus stop,
Silent, proud-footed, thorny-topped.
There perhaps it had once seen us stop;
All that morning, nobody stopped.
It hardly seemed the thing to confront it.
We’ve little practice with bucks or deer;
Anyway, nobody tried to hunt it;
Anyway, nobody asked it here,
Maimed it, lamed it, blamed or shamed it!
This, in fact, is the most one can say:
A buck stopped here and nobody claimed it.
It waited a while, then it wandered away.
—Julia Griffin